Nightingale
by riversrunthroughme
Summary: Hyuuga Neji goes missing nin, which is more complicated than it sounds. Luckily the Uchiha brothers are experts in professional treachery and more than willing to give him tips...whether he wants them or not. /post timeskip/ Sound Village mind f***ery/
1. Atelophobia

**Atelophobia**

* * *

_: fear of imperfection_

* * *

Around the Hyuuga estate it could observed: during fall, a very peculiar phenomenon near the dawn of every morning.

If one were to sit on the roof of the estate's eastern wall and watch the closest window, they would undoubtedly watch a sizeable flock of rather plump birds huddling about the shudders. If one stuck around longer they could also observe Hyuuga Neji flinging the window open and glaring at them. Not startling any of the waiting sparrows outside, however, they all take great care to eye him impatiently from their sparsely covered perches in the tree outside. They are almost too tame for their own good; though, they'd scatter like the birds they are if any _other_ member of the Hyuuga Clan were to open the window.

"You're getting fat," he remarked to the nearest sparrow.

It peeped in reply, ruffling its feathers importantly.

"Aren't the lot of you supposed to fly south?"

He frowned at the bird which only blinked inky eyes uncomprehendingly at him. With a sigh he poured a handful of tiny seeds along the sill and the small flock made a show of hopping into the room and pecking at the free meal. Neji ignored them; going to his closet and finding the clothes he'd laid out for his reconnaissance mission later today. Apparently Tsunade was having a problem with an overly talkative ally somewhere in the Rain and it would mean lots if he could be bothered to go hide up a tree – in the torrential downpour – for a couple weeks and make sure said ally wasn't spouting his mouth off when he shouldn't. He grimaced as he threw his clothes on, jerking them over his shoulders.

'_God, I hate the Rain.'_

Neji had been living in the main house for over a year.

Only days after his promotion to jounin his uncle and clan leader had suddenly – somewhat gruffly – cleared out a room for him in the head house and relocated him there. Not certain what to make of this, the young Hyuuga pretended somewhat ineffectively he just hadn't _noticed_ all his things jumping out of the branch family house. It made him uncomfortable (occasionally angry) when his uncle tried to…'apologize' but that hadn't had any affect whatsoever on his living arrangements.

Naturally the transition had been a little messy. It had taken the elders some time to assure themselves that – no – Neji wasn't secretly planning to murder them all and – yes – he'd matured since he was thirteen-year-old prodigy with a semi-homicidal fatalism complex. After much debate, some screaming about breaking traditions, and general domestic violence, the head family came to the decision (mostly because Haishi put his foot down on some stubborn old heads) and moved him unceremoniously into the head house.

Neji might have protested the move but he had to admit…he rather enjoyed passing the more stuck up members of his clan and watching them balk at the sight of him coming. Also, being closer to estranged members of his immediate family did have its occasional rewards – Not living alone in that particular wing of the branch house, sleeping in the middle of a two-person bed that once smelled vaguely of men's cologne, jasmine perfume and burnt hair. (His mother had always charred her bangs using Katon…)

His only regret may have been the bathrooms however. It was a running joke that everyone in the Hyuuga head family all woke nicely at dawn almost all at the same time and clogged all bathroom access for hours. Neji's room was the farthest east-facing room and therefore the first to be struck by dawn light, therefore the first to be woken by it. Dressing hurriedly, he rushed out the door, grabbed up his pre-packed travel satchel and didn't bother to knot his hair back. He'd manage that after he beat the morning toilet rush.

Sure enough, he was narrowly the first in the lavatory, a bleary looking Hanabi padding down the hall and yawning. She blinked rheumy lavender eyes and waved at him. Six years his junior, Hyuuga Hanabi was his cousin in the head family. She was also the only one brave enough to _ask_ him to pass salt at dinner.

Neji soaked his head, quickly lathering and rinsing his long dark hair in the sink and pushing it, dripping, out of his face. He toweled the soaking mass quickly and (perhaps unwillingly) stared hard at his reflection in the looking glass. A pair of wide white-lilac colored eyes peered eerily back at him without pupil, the ring of color fused through over the opening. It was him looking back, sixteen-year-old Hyuuga Neji, clear skinned, currently expressionless, looking ready to walk out the door and be the ninja he looked like. Hanabi knocked lightly.

"You die or something?"

"Fine. I'm coming out now, Hanabi."

He quickly slipped his forehead protector on, knotting the black cloth at the base of his neck, tying the heavy metal plate just over the vulnerable slope of his forehead. It completely covered the tattoo-like like etching across the breadth of the skin there, acid green, neat and elegant. Like a four cornered pinwheel between two mirrored lines. Even today, years after coming to grips with his inner turmoil associated with that thin green design, he didn't hold any appreciable fondness of mirrors.

He let his cousin in the bathroom, grinning as she'd begun a small and rather undignified potty-dance outside the door, one she immediately stopped when he appeared. She blushed slightly when he looked at her, long sable hair sticking up in uneven lumps from the back of her head.

"Hinata's late," she said hurriedly, scooting into the open door behind him. "Scouting mission. Not back yet."

Neji inclined his head. "Scouting mission?"

Hanabi nodded vigorously, hopping from foot to foot. "Uh-huh." And slammed the door. Her voice was muffled. "Wait for me!"

He might have if she hadn't told him to do so. Since she did, Neji turned on his heel and strolled down the hall for one of the side doors. He skirted the rest of the approaching Hyuuga Clan, all still sleepy and trying to maintain dignity that didn't really exist this early in the morning. He slipped out through the front door, stopping to retrieve his shoes before stepping into one of private gardens out back. Hanabi tracked him down eventually, pulling the screen door wide and scowling at him.

"You could have waited," she grumbled, closing it behind her.

"And I could have left early for my mission," he replied, shifting the weight of his travel pack. Needlessly he asked, "What did you need, Hanabi?"

She stepped off the porch, joining him in the small inner courtyard and looked around. "Are we -?"

"No one's watching," Neji said curtly.

The ten-year-old took three measured steps back and started to shift her weight, carefully spreading her arms out in a delicate, but undeniably correct, looking stance. She looked expectantly up at him. Waiting. _'Spoiled little brat,_' he thought without venom. Neji studied her weight placement critically. She tended to lean too much weight back on instinct. He nudged her front foot slightly, turning her toe out and circled her casually, making a show of looking her up and down, waiting to see if she'd second-guess her stance at the last second.

"Bato-san says my stance is perfect," she informed him challengingly.

Neji didn't remark on that, mostly because it was true – her stance was pretty much perfect – and because Hyuuga Bato was one of the clan's best Juuken teachers. He was a head family member. It wouldn't do for Neji to go around contradicting the Hyuuga's number one tutor. Bad taste and all that. Neji adjusted the angle of his cousin's arm and tilted her shoulders into a slight forward slope.

"He says I'm ready for Kaiten."

"What do you think about that?" he inquired mildly, studying how she balanced on the balls of her feet rather than the entire foot. _'You cheater. You've been skipping ahead.'_

The girl struggled with the answer for a moment, repressing her frustration that Neji wasn't just going to tell her the answer she was hoping for. He held his tongue nevertheless, ghosting quick hands across his cousin's shoulders, letting his fingers show her the perfect line of centre. Years of special attention from her father and other Hyuuga elders had given her the answers all her life. She'd never been more than a single question away from getting what she wanted to know. Neji irked her with his counter questions, but she mulled it over a moment before grumbling.

"I want to know what _you_ think."

"Why? I thought your stance was perfect." He traced out from her shoulders, fingers brushing down her arms to her elbow. He shifted them just slightly, realigning them across her body. "Keep the chakra flow clean as possible." He sat back against the stairs and nodded. "Go through a couple katas. Keep your weight on your toes, but keep your heels down or I'll push you right over."

She glared. "You will not," she said contemptuously.

He shoved her over.

Hanabi sputtered indignantly, but Neji just sat back and propped his elbows on the low porch, allowing himself a small smile. "Try to at least get five." He made a show of yanking a tangle out of his hair as she got off her butt, blushing furiously. "I don't want to get up every time you get lazy."

She gritted her teeth so hard he could pick up the tiny squeaking sounds of grating calcium. The little girl resumed her previous stance, briefly tucking her hair behind one ear. Neji watched her forehead crease into soft V's as the muscles around her eyes tensed, tightening to accommodate the veins of chakra threading their way across her temples into her optical nerve behind the eye. _'She's been practicing. She doesn't need the hand-seals anymore.'_

Slowly, as if moving between silk curtains, Hanabi began to move.

Arms first in a long deliberate thrust that looked more like an offered hand, she altered her direction, sliding, shifting slowly, smoothly from one position to another. Hands rigid flats as she moved, she began to slide her feet to follow, careful to keep her weight just so, balanced painstakingly on the fore of her foot.

In his eyes, bright strings of chakra threaded like neon tube-lights through the girl's tiny body. After ten slow kata her arms began to tremble minutely. Neji lifted one brow, more for Hanabi's benefit than anything else. She caught it. The girl barely managed to stifle her tiny self-satisfied smile, just eating up the tiny glimmer of approval. Her next kata was smoother, strong with confidence. Neji hadn't asked her to do her katas while channeling her chakra into her fingers, to control the flow of her energy through the delicate network of energy paths, to spy on him while he was doing his own training katas and try to do the same thing herself.

He smirked and closed his eyes, leaning back again. She was starting to act like him. Hiashi would be furious.

"Neji?"

He didn't open his eyes. "Yes?"

"I talked to father…about you training me in Juuken…"

The older Hyuuga sat up. "Stop it, Hanabi. I can't."

"But you do it better, everyone knows…" She stopped, casting about with Byakugan eyes. She looked at him again, still moving through her stances with fluidity to envy. "Everyone knows you do it better than that idiot Bato. Even father doesn't deny that. Why can't you teach me?"

"You know why."

"But Bato _sucks_."

"Hanabi," Neji said warningly.

"Well he does!" she wailed. "And he's forcing his awful habits on me. He's got this stupid routine thing he does whenever he shows me anything. He thinks it looks cool, but he just looks like a flailing duck. And he _drones_. I can feel my brain getting slower. He doesn't do anything like you do and I know it's wrong. Why should I learn wrong when…?"

Neji stopped her with a stern look. After she was quietly doing katas again he answered her, careful to keep his voice even and his eyes straightforward.

"Bato has perfect Juuken form. That's why. You can't learn from me because my Juuken is not correct, Hanabi. I've already told you this. You're not learning anything wrong. Be thankful Hiashi-sama arranged for Bato-san to train you in his absence." He started to sit back again, through arguing with her. "He could have just left you with endless kata routines. Now stop complaining."

Hanabi turned back to her stances. Despite this, his eyes still caught the shape of her silent, spiteful words before she put her back to him. Though Hanabi had never been bitter toward him previously, the words still pricked, drawing a warm red bead that stung him more sharply than he'd anticipated:

'You taught Hinata.'

Neji looked away at a small tree nearby, studying a dangling leaf near the top. Not so deep down Neji knew Hanabi was right; Bato was an inferior fighter. She would surpass the man before she graduated the academy, but Neji couldn't deny that the man's Juuken was – in purity of style only – superior to his. The methods Hanabi preferred to copy from her impromptu sensei – however effective in dispatching the enemy – weren't _Hyuuga_.

Haishi never said it aloud but during the brief time he'd trained Hinata in secret, Neji taught her bad habits. In actuality, it simply couldn't be helped. By ritual, the head family trained all the clan children in basic Byakugan control and Hyuuga style Juuken. Once it was established the kids could wield their bloodline effectively, the branch children were dropped from Byakugan training like hot-potatoes and left to fend for themselves. Branch family members, therefore, have a distinctly different Juuken style than their head family counterparts, namely, an incorrect one. And a Hyuuga heiress cannot fight like a – God-forbid – branch family member.

The jounin let her think he hadn't noticed her silent accusation for about five stances.

Softly he rejoined, "Only because no one else would."

An unreadable mixture of jealousy and shame played tag across the pale, developing angles of her face.

Unlike Hinata, with her soft effeminate features and gentle bone-structure, Hanabi was taking on a longer, thinner face-shape. It was too early to tell if this would work for her or against her in the looks department. In Hyuuga women the line between beauty and freakish was thin and until puberty passed, she was caught in the strange middle-ground. Not quite beautiful, not yet ugly. Quietly he told her to centre her weight. Otherwise she was perfect. She took this with another compromise of pride and bitterness, finally choosing to give up her argument.

"A messenger hawk is circling the estate," Hanabi mentioned casually. "One from that Sand jounin, again."

"I know. That's why I waited outside." Neji glanced overhead. "I'll head out once it delivers the message."

"Is it that the puppeteer or his sister?"

"Probably Temari," Neji reasoned, watching the growing shape of desert hawk overhead, circling lower, lazily. "She's the envoy for the Hidden Sand. If she needs a place to stay, she _should _just message Tenten. It's her house we always end up at."

"That girl probably likes talking to _you_," Hanabi smirked, leering expertly at her cousin, katas remaining flawless despite. "She has a thing for geniuses I think."

"She also has a thing for the Nara. She's just too proud to say so." He tilted his head back; standing up at the bird soared low, taking one last pass over the roof. "Yellow hawk. She needs somewhere to stay. Hanabi you should probably move. The yellow ones don't –"

SCREECH!

"AIII!" Hanabi took cover, screaming as the giant avian dive-bombed the Hyuuga heiress, clawing and pecking furiously at the crown of her head. The back-draft of its wings thundered in the tiny garden, blowing leaves off their branches and blasting dust into fast whirls. Hanabi ran shrieking, waving her arms and bawling for her cousin to '– do something now or so help me _God_ I'll make you sorry!'

"– like you," Neji finished monotonously. He sighed. "I'll get it."

After a struggle, some more screaming and a little coaxing on Neji's part, they finally got the bird out of Hanabi's hair and on Neji's arm where it was suppose to – supposedly trained to – have landed in the first place. The animal began pecking gently at his hand, snapping its beak to be sufficiently troublesome while the Hyuuga retrieved the letter coiled about its leg. Neji sucked briefly on his bleeding index finger, scowling a bit. Temari was fond of sending her most temperamental birds to the estate in hopes of pissing off various members of his uptight family. Plus she knew Neji had a knack with fierce, flying creatures.

"Why are you letting it near your face?" Hanabi hissed from the door. She rubbed her cheek, smearing the red across her face. "Ugh. Don't pet it, Neji! Tell that awful girl to stop sending you those psychotic birds."

"They're not psychotic, they just sense weakness," Neji informed her somewhat blithely, smoothing the hawk's head crest. "Keep practicing."

She muttered under her breath and circled away to a safe distance.

Neji sat down and offered the hawk his shoulder. Once it had gotten quite comfortable, it started combing its beak through his hair and shifting about fretfully while it tugged on his bangs. He waved it away without passion and focused on Temari's letter. Since the alliance between the Sand and Leaf had really started to take affect, with Garra taking his father's place as Kazekage and his siblings jumping ranks to jounin, the young woman had been in and out of Konoha every other month or so. Having shared a couple particularly dreadful missions with the blond previously – therefore being the only associate in Konoha in her age bracket – she'd taken to arranging her sleeping accommodations with him and his teammates. The letter read:

_Bright-Eyes,_

_I know this is short notice, but I've got a mission to the Rain and a bunch of politics to talk with the Old Lady Hokage. Garra has something up his sleeve, God knows what, but I'm playing go-between like a good little ninja. She knows I'm coming. It's scheduled. I'm en route now so don't bother sending the hawk back with a message. Thanks. Oh! As a side note: My brother's tied up with his puppet troop so he can't make good on that promise to Tenten about the advanced summoning scrolls, but he promises – for real this time – to get her something decent to study. I can't believe she mastered the last three already. Tell her I'm impressed. We'll talk later. _

_PS: Did Suza do any damage or did you tame him too?_

_Until then, _

_Temari_

"One of these days I'm going to ignore her and just leave her to hang," he muttered, stroking the hawk absently as he did. The Hanabi narrowed her talcum colored eyes as she finished another stance, muttering something to the affect of 'Maybe you should…' and moving into the next one. The bird shifted, preening itself and hissing throatily to be fed. Neji would have to track down something raw and sufficiently bloody from the kitchen. The young jounin got up and found his bag, slinging it over his free shoulder. "I need to go. Heels down, shoulders aligned, remember it."

The girl's eyes widened. "You're not going in the house with that thing are you?"

"It won't hurt anyone."

"It hurt me."

"It won't hurt anyone else."

"If Bato catches you…" she said somewhat more seriously.

"It's fine," Neji promised her, one hand on the door frame. The bird, Suza, made a low cawing noise and nipped at his hair again. "Bato isn't the one I'm worried about. It's–,"

The screen door slid open.

A thin, severe looking Hyuuga woman had stepped halfway out.

Neji froze on instinct, his heart jumping like a skittish cat inside is ribcage to vanish, leaping up into his throat before he could so much as manage a 'pardon me'. Somehow she'd caught up in the door with him, smiling thinly as she always did. She grabbed his arm the elbow, meaning to pull him into the house with her before Hanabi noticed the tension between them, but Temari's hawk screeched and the impetuous hand snapped back instantaneously.

Silently Neji logged that away to thank Temari for when she arrived later. For once her scheme to piss off his family had been mutually engaging for the both of them.

Neji waited for the older woman to gather her scattered wits, dashed apart by the presence of a big, mean, hungry looking nin-hawk. Her long, dark hair – she dyed it to maintain the color - was drawn back proudly to the nape of her neck, exposing the smooth whiteness of her forehead so Neji could inspect the furrows of disapproval tilling her eyebrows together. Technically his grandmother, the woman somehow missed out on the genetic stamping process that tells grandparents to love and dote on all their grandchildren.

While she adored Hanabi, she pretended Hinata did not exist along with everyone else and pointedly despised Neji for sharing air with other members of the Hyuuga. She'd activated his curse seal on eight different occasions. More than any other two members of the clan combined. The woman drew herself up with great dignity and attempted something like a smile for Hanabi's benefit.

"Neji-kun," she greeted him pleasantly. She waved to Hanabi. "Hana-chan. Yuuki-sama is waiting for you in the breakfast hall. Why don't you get going?"

She waited until the girl had vanished through one of the other doors before resuming her previous course of action. She grabbed his opposite arm this time, putting Neji's head between her and the grouchy looking bird on his shoulder, and pulled him hard inside. She maneuvered him back against a wall and stood back to properly glare down her nose at him…which was hard because he was taller.

"What are you telling that girl?"

"Nothing, Michiko-san."

She delivered that thin, quavering smile. "That is 'sama', Neji-_kun_. Hanabi-chan cannot afford to be learning your bastardized Hakke techniques. If I catch you forcing your training on her behind the backs of the Council, I'll punish you myself. It that very clear to you?"

Her thin, papery lips trembled over her teeth, waiting eagerly to become a snarl in opposition to her current courteous smile. Neji didn't answer right away, lest he grant her authority she didn't yet have. Hyuuga Hiashi had never protested Neji's short instructional interludes with either of his daughters, so long as they were in accordance with his own teaching. Michiko took note of his pause; the hesitation to comply made those lips jump into an ugly curl.

"Do I make myself clear?"

"Hanabi asks for my opinion on her form. I'm obligated to give it, am I not?" Neji inquired, keeping his voice even.

"You are not obligated to oversee her in her morning kata routines," she replied swiftly. "And you will use the proper honorifics in accordance with your station, Neji. I will be fair to you. If I catch you either training Hanabi-chan, or using improper etiquette again, I will have to exact the consequences." Her wrinkled mouth cut up into a knife-slice of smiling teeth. "It that clear enough for you?"

Those long bony hands folded primly just below her breast, as if waiting for something to do.

Neji blandly considered the consequences that might be exacted if he flung an angry bird of prey into the old woman's face, pondering whether or not that elderly Hyuuga would have the presence of mind to form hand-seals as a hawk pecked her nose off. Instead he reached up to stroke the animal's head, calming the predatory tension that was driving it's talons into the under-armor of his shoulder. It bristled still until Neji turned his face into its wing and murmured. Michiko watched the exchange with narrow, jumpy eyes, like a woman sensing she's being spoken ill-of in a foreign language.

Neji returned his attention to her.

"I've never trained Hanabi-sama. I only give her the benefit of what experience I can offer as a member of this clan and a shinobi of Konoha. She's only asking for a second opinion." Neji lied effortlessly. (Actually, if given the authority, his cousin would drop Bato, forbid the Hyuuga prodigy to leave the estate and make him train her everyday for hours if she could. So desperate was she to be the next genius of the Hyuuga, the pedigree and prodigy of the head family, Neji wondered sometimes if he shouldn't sit down and talk with her about it. She was too desperate to be like him...and he wasn't sure why.) "Until Hiashi-sama himself forbids that too, I can't be held responsible for granting her requests."

Michiko pursed her lips and for a moment Neji thought she might just leave the conversation at that. He waited impatiently to be gone.

One of her thin, wrinkled hands - the one farthest from Suza - moved to touch his face, soft, scented fingers stroking the curve of his cheekbone. This sent ram-rod jolts of shock down his spine. She studied his face with a warm, affectionate kind of smile that defied _every logic_ Neji had come to associate with this woman. Suza fidgeted, sensing his confusion, hissing quietly. Michiko tucked a loose strand of hair behind his ear, fingers still lingering against his cheek.

"You have Hizashi's defiance," she announced, voice resounding, like a proud mother. For a moment, Neji almost thought - in a moment of psychosis only - the woman had succumbed to nostalgia, savoring the tracery of her dead son in his only child.

Then she lifted her other hand, fingers forming the familiar, dreaded seal. Neji felt his blood go absolutely cold.

"But too often you forget your place."

Neji, if pressed to explain how it felt to have the Cage Seal activated, would have said it's like a hybrid cross between having a firecracker go off inside your skull and someone ramming thumbtacks into the back of your eyes. It's always the same too, the exact same agony each time varying only in length and intent.

It's the shock of it that drives you to your knees, like being punched in the nose without warning brings reflexive tears to your eyes. Then the long, lingering _searing _sensation sets in, locking up your throat so you can't even breath because your still trying to scream, still trying to vocalize, to express, to purge the whirlwind of razors shredding the inside of your skull. And strangely there's this garroting wire tension through your torso, tight inside your body from abdomen to eyes, like your insides are going to snap like fishing line. Some have presence on mind to clutch their heads and scream or beg.

The rare few, like Neji, just collapse and lie still, paralyzed.

Time ticks by, blurred by in uncounted units, untallied centuries of misery. The serenity is strange, for Neji at least. Even while every synapse in his brain is crackling with acid flames, his eyes burning up, liquifying in his head, his entire being shrieking inside the chaos of his mind, he can still see clearly. Lying perfectly still, he can barely sense his body as if on the opposite end of some spectrum, limp on his back, limbs fallen at odd angles to lie where they may as a member of his family looks on, puzzled by the stillness in his torture – it has the unfortunate affect of making it easy for them to maintain the seal for a longer time.

Even then, he can see his grandmother standing over him, peering impetuously down at him, eyebrows arched high as if doubtful the seal is doing anything at all. The entire time Neji is screaming, sobbing, clawing his hands bloody against his scalp inside his head, images of anything and everything he would do if he could move to prove just how hideously she was ripping him apart, destroying him, utterly unmaking everything he was into screaming, macabre _nothing_...

Then it was over.

Neji jerked, gasping down a huge, shuddering breath so fast he started coughing, gagging on precious oxygen. Still coughing, he had to roll onto his side, pressing the heel of his hands against his forehead to finally, _finally_ do something to relieve the pain.

Hyuuga Michiko nodded primly. "I hope that taught you, this time, Neji," she says, as if having slapped the back of his hand.

The woman turned away, the hem of her formal robes brushing the tips of his fingers as she moved down the hall. Neji lifted his face from the floor, glaring through the sting of saline tears, teeth set, gritting so hard his jaw ached.

"It's foolish to fight back," she called luxuriously, as if she couldn't be bothered to stop and explain things to him. "You'll see one day."

Then she was gone.

Neji levered himself up, casting around in search of Temari's hawk which had vanished from his line of sight. He thought he'd seen the bird attacking the Hyuuga woman, but the nin-hawk was smart. It would have taken off surely, hidden in the rafters overhead, flown out a window. Temari taught her birds to be fierce, but smart. There was a smell, like burnt hair lingering in the hall. Neji got to his feet and looked around. He found Suza against the wall a few yards behind him, heart burst, insides a bloated ruin of cooked meat.

Michiko had used Juuken to kill the hawk in a single hit.

No one saw him mourn it.

**Author's Note:**

_Saddle up, people. This is gonna be a weird and wicked ride. I've been dabbling in a Neji story for the better part of a long time and realized I should probably post it or something. Time frame is post-time skip months before Naruto's return to Konoha. Much of the plot details stem from my own silly Hyuuge/Uchiha theories so kick me in the shin if something doesn't make sense and needs clarifying. Reviews are cherished. Criticism is appreciated. _


	2. Anthophobia

**Anthophobia**

* * *

_: fear of flowers_

* * *

Haruno Sakura lived only three streets down from the Hyuuga estate. Not many people knew that. He wasn't sure why. The young medic herself seemed surprised at their proximity most of the time, looking decidedly startled when he happened to catch her gaze on the sidewalk or step in line behind her at the local bakery for breakfast. Aside from looking surprised, she usually looked a shade nervous, as if he might take a sudden dislike to her excruciatingly slow method of counting change – one coin at the time, dammit! – and Juuken the back of her head one morning.

Point was the girl barely spoke to him most of the time.

After the sun rose it tucked up behind the clouds to vanish into the dark dreary blanket. Casting the world into shades of gray and blue, cold iced breath into a visible puff of silvery smoke. The streets were still quiet with the sluggish morning stupor that came with the dawn and Neji wondered pragmatically if his target would even be up at this hour. She seemed like a late sleeper. A couple people passed him as he made his way there but no one ventured to ask him about the bundle of cloth wound tight in his arms or why he was headed _away_ from mission HQ. In perfect honestly he couldn't say exactly why he felt compelled to ask her, to at least risk a request. He hadn't spoken more than a handful of words to her.

But for some reason something like a mild panic had usurped his ability to form a cognitive thought beyond the thin plan he had in motion. The strange, shuddering anxiety had winged around inside his chest like a riot of starlings before finally roosting uncomfortably in his belly. There they proceeded to make the boy physically ill, clawing and pecking up the inside of his gut, wringing his insides round in wretched knots. Tenten and Lee would be up. They were always up with him, but the idea of running into either of them this morning pumped his system with a toxic dread.

'_They'd make a _scene_,'_ he thought scathingly, stomach lurching at the very idea. _'They'd get indignant and _loud_ and righteous and – I can _not_ do that. Not now. No. I don't need it'_

His hands were shaking even while wrapped around the parcel in his arms, shivers assailing him so fiercely his teeth were chattering gently, causing his head to pound ferociously. Everything hurt, but he was long since beyond letting something like a little physical aftermath unfocus him. He was a jounin now, dammit. Whining and whimpering about Hyuuga politics now – even two years after what his family referred to at 'The Exam' – was superfluous at best, but it was just such…an unbelievably _wretched_ piece of bad timing, of flagrant spite.

He had a mission today. It was an unwritten taboo: You don't activate a curse seal on a shinobi's mission day.

Neji shoved that thought out of his head, blinking at the door in front of him and wondering for how long he'd been standing there staring at it while his brain chased itself in circles. He raked a hand through his hair angrily, scouring his mind for any last minute ideas better than this one. In the end he rang the doorbell and waited.

If Sakura looked nervously surprised spotting him in the street it was a damn sight nearer to terrified astonishment when she opened the door to a cold, slightly disheveled looking Hyuuga prodigy. For a moment the two Leaf-nin stared at one another, each taking in the state of the other, having neither seen the other so…previously out of sorts.

Her peculiar pinkish hair hadn't been combed yet, sticking up in that familiar way Hanabi's did before brushing, her shocked sea-green eyes slightly round under long pale strands. Arduous training routines and crash-dieting inherent in all teenage girls had stripped her down to a lean, deceptive figure. Possessing a strange, disproportioned kind of appeal – there was something cute about the forehead – she could successfully convince any enemy of her frail delicacy.

Then she usually broke their jaw in with a roundhouse.

For a moment she stammered silently, mouth falling open and closed in noiseless mimicry of protest or of question or of curiosity. Neji was honestly too tired to translate the words from her miming lips, certain they weren't anything he wanted to understand. He just sighed and stilled her words with a couple of his own.

"Can I ask you a favor?" he asked quietly.

She blinked. "Ah…umm…sure?" she stammered, backing ungracefully from the door. "Come in. I think my parents are gone already, so…uh…"

The ellipses floating off the back of her half-finished thought and were left to hang there like little banners of uncertainty. Flushed slightly, the girl waved quickly down the hall and began leading him toward the living room…or so he presumed. She seemed prone to help him, though her reply didn't inspire confidence, but growing up on the Hyuuga estate had taught him at least one thing useful to a ninja: reading people.

And every inch of Sakura's face was throwing down against itself.

Every nuance of expression fought to maintain a generous smile for a guest, the brash brassy glare of a veteran kunoichi, a sliver of dislike on principle of who he was, and some nameless random fury at being bothered before she had time to brush her teeth. It was almost fun to watch. Neji carefully sidestepped a crooked coat rack to give his impromptu hostess required breathing room to gather her wits from where they'd scattered all across the hallway. If he knew anything about the medical chuunin, then she would get over being surprised and start getting aggressive quite soon.

Sakura led him into the family room before the aggression set in. Her hands jumped up suddenly, spread wide and disarmed before she pivoted hard on her foot to face him, a kind of grim, sarcastic smile pulled across her mouth.

"Umm, Neji-san. Sorry if I'm come off kind of blunt, but why are you here?" she articulated the last part with slow, succinct consonants, biting them neatly off at each end. "I know Hinata well enough, but I never got the impression we were on casual-conversation-terms, much less visits-at-four-AM-terms."

It wasn't four AM, but she had a point. Neji took a seat on the couch and laid his parcel in his lap, staring down at it for a moment before he slid his shoulder bag down his arm to the floor. He repressed the sudden need to sigh enormously and massage some of the unwanted pressure building up under his forehead. His face was prickling uncomfortably, like a hot and cold pins and needles mixture crawling across his skin into his brain, numbing his tongue until he almost forgot what it was his fellow shinobi had asked him. He leaned forward, placing the wrapped thing on the low table and started to tug the cloth loose.

"You medical training included some level of cell reconstruction, correct?" he asked somewhat tiredly.

"Of course." The pinked-haired medic stopped in the door, one shoulder braced against the frame, a hand at her hip. "Tsunade-sama taught me. She has high standards."

"Of course," he murmured. Neji paused on the last fold. "Can you revive recently dead animals?"

Her eyes bounced to the cloth, then back to him. Her lips pursed very slightly. "To some level, yes."

He pulled the last part loose and let the flap fall open on the table. Temari's dead messenger hawk lay on the table. Neji sat back with an uncharacteristic lack of grace, falling into the couch cushions with a 'whoof' and he sank back, exhausted, relieved. There. Done. He'd come, he'd asked, his contract of responsibility as Temari's friend – at least for this God-given minute – had expired. Neji squeezed his eyes shut and inhaled, tilting his head back and resisting the urge to make some kind of unsightly moan or sigh. Instead he thought, _'I fucking hate that woman.'_ and felt better.

For a moment Sakura just stared at the dead bird carcass lying on her coffee table. Her expression was a split between disgust and another softer sympathetic expression. After another moment she made a soft noise, again, indistinguishable between disgust and sympathy and moved into the room, circling the table to take a seat opposite the Hyuuga. She chewed her lip, then reached a hand out to touch the still feathers.

"What happened?" she murmured, fingers smoothing rumpled down.

"There was an accident this morning," he replied dully, reaching up to rub his aching face with one hand and not caring if the girl saw him do it. "One of my clan…thought the bird was a threat. It belongs to a friend and I…"

He felt his voice start to strain and swallowed it before the word could crack. Sakura looked up at him, the green in her eyes suddenly oceans of suspicion and concern. The dark beads of pupil shifted quickly across his face, searching like black spotlights for something amiss. He fought down a wave of illogical irritation with her, with himself, with this aching sense of ridiculous failure. Like he'd strangled the stupid animal himself.

"I can't stand to tell her what happened. I thought you might…"

Sakura hunched over with a loud sigh and ran a hand through her bed-rumpled hair. Neji cut himself off, feeling himself get rigid at her reaction. Thoughts snapped through the fore of his mind: This was a bad idea, ridiculous even to consider in the general ballpark of success. Why was he here? He would have liked nothing better than to get up, apologize for being a bother and leave as fast as humanly possible. However, the vision of Temari's raging face in his near future – and the stabbing pain in the forefront of his brain – prevented him from doing either. He just bit the inside of his cheek and waited tensely.

Meanwhile the kunoichi had begun rubbing her fingers together in a recognizable tic, thinking. "Was this done with Juuken?

Neji grimaced inwardly. "Yes."

A sigh.

The Hyuuga looked away.

"I can try," she said softly. She chewed her lip lightly, studying an arc of ceiling as she her mind fluttered through the myriad of medical procedures. "But…Juuken destroys internal organs and, intentionally or not, chakra paths. It'll take some time and I can't guarantee the bird will be the same afterward. Unless your friend is retarded, they're not going to miss there's something wrong with it." Her hands came together again, pressing her palms together lightly. Neji waited for her to finish. Sakura rolled her eyes, sighing heavily, as if disgusted with herself. "But I can _do_ it. Just give me a couple days, alright."

He lowered his voice. "Thank you."

"It's nothing."

"No. It's more than nothing. I'll find a way to repay you."

The girl waved a hand in feminine dismissal. "Consider us even. You got two giant holes slugged through you two years ago for…" Her eyes ticked every so slightly, the infinitesimal pulse of her heart-rate in her throat suddenly jumping. She forced an excruciating smile. "…my teammate. The least I can do is heal your bird Neji-kun." The 'kun' had an invisible question mark tagged to the end, asking permission.

He nodded. "Then we're even."

A genuine smile ghosted through her expression and she covered the bird, standing up. "Good," said Sakura. She cast him a worrisome smile and – to his utter horror – came around to sit on the floor near him. Folding her hands on the table she pursed her lips, a habit he'd only observed in teachers, mothers, and occasionally Tsunade. "You…don't look good, Neji-kun. I'll be honest. You almost look sick."

"It's a headache," he managed far too quickly.

Sakura's eyes jumped, startled, brows bouncing upward. "Oh…" she said slowly. 'Really?' her eyebrows continued.

No not really. The entire inside of his skull was trying to push its way out of his head, his eyes were aching, his ears would stop ringing (wouldn't stop ringing for another hour at least). 'Sick' didn't quite cover it. Sudden blind fury and frustration blitzed briefly through him, eviscerating his calm. Within the hour he'd be meeting with the Hokage for his briefing, then winging off to God-knows where for who-knows how long to do heaven-knows what under a guise of secrecy and general sneakiness. It wouldn't be easy. He didn't need this, any of this. All this shit. He didn't need it.

He managed to keep his inflection even-tempered. "Stress," he expanded. "I'm sorry, but I have to go." She was sitting uncomfortably near, almost touching his knee. He imagined sourly that personal space was not something a doctor was overly encouraged to respect and tried to forgive her for being so incredibly…Sakura. He shifted his leg away from her, hiding the move by reaching for his travel bag, irritated by his own acute awareness of the kunoichi's proximity. "Thank you Sakura-san. I'm grateful."

She stood quickly, stepping fast to cut him off and keep him sitting. "Tsunade-sama was called in late for an emergency meeting. She'll be a little late with the jounin briefings," she said curtly. The student of the Godaime smiled thinly, hands falling to her hips. "So you don't have to run off so quickly." Neji sat back, too shocked to think of a reply. Sakura sat on the edge of the table across from him, hands pressed together between her knees. "Ten-chan told me you're taking on special assignments. Not that it's any of my business, but she worries about you. You know that right?"

"Of course I do," Neji muttered.

"She think's you're trying to get into ANBU." She frowned. "You'd cause a big fuss if you did. First Hyuuga in decades, youngest ANBU since…" Her eyes flickered. "She's right to be worried."

"I don't want to join ANBU."

"Tsunade-sama indicates otherwise. I overhear a lot of stuff between her and Shizune and your name comes up pretty often."

Neji repressed a mild tic at the corner of his mouth. "I don't want to join ANBU," he reiterated.

"That's not what everyone seems to think," she said pleasantly.

"Everyone seems to think wrong then," replied Neji unpleasantly. He was suddenly very eager to be gone now. Being incessantly pestered by various kunoichi he was only barely acquainted with was something he tolerated a total of never. "How long do you suppose the Hokage will be held up for? I might drop by the training grounds to find Shino or Lee."

Sakura frowned. "Shino?"

Neji skipped over the potential drama there and moved hastily on. "Have any idea?"

She shrugged. "Can't say. It was just a memo from Shizune to cancel my morning training." There was a pause. "_Aburame _Shino? Are you two…_friends_?" Said with the same horror as 'a couple?' Neji tried to contemplate just why the thought of him and the Aburame being in the same company terrified so many people. Sakura was waiting for him to answer when the phone rang.

The kunoichi looked over at the phone in disapproval, as if perturbed that it should interrupt her interrogation practice. Neji wished very much to tell her that – despite not going into ANBU – he'd had ANBU level Torture Resistance Training. (He was too young, once again, for the course, but after he started taking on missions that could not only get him captured, but effectively dissected, they made an exception.) He wasn't afraid of a little ninja girl with pink hair, no matter how alarming her disregard for personal space. She got up to answer it, leaving Neji with a warning not to go anywhere.

He watched her pick it up, leaning up against the counter, one arm tucked at her middle.

"Hello? This is her." She shifted a little. "Oh they are. What was it about?" Neji could hear someone speaking quickly, meaningless burble from a distance. "What? She isn't? Have they contacted–? They did. What did he–?" She shot Neji a sudden, furtive look. "Actually don't bother. I can pass on the message. He's sitting right here." Surprise jolted the young Hyuuga and he stared openly at the girl who was considering him grimly. She jerked. "What? No! He has a bird he wanted me to –" She turned brilliantly scarlet. "Good-bye, Shizune."

The girl hung up and Neji was already getting to his feet. "They're looking for me," he said conclusively.

"The meeting's over," Sakura said, her expression void of all previous mischief. Her gaze was a chill aquamarine as she looked on. "Tsunade wants you. Details are classified so…you know."

Neji slung his bag over his shoulder and moved toward the door. "I'll let myself out. Thank you, Sakura-san."

"No problem," she said pensively. "Be careful out there."

It started raining on the way to mission HQ, heavy sheets of thick, temperate downpour that saturated his clothes and his hair into a slick symbiosis with his skin. The streets seemed absolutely desolate, or perhaps they always had been. The only sound was the resonating ping and patter of drops as they plinked and bounced off the rooftops, the muttering metallic melody whirring persistently in his ears. He knew already that something awful waited for him when he got to that giant central building, the same something that made every line in Sakura's face flinch while Shizune spoke.

People remarked that he seemed precognitive to bad news. That wasn't true. He was just good at reading people.

By the time he pushed his way into the lobby, the same medic-nin was waiting for him, expression one of consternation and trained detachment inherent in all jounin. Neji knew he was wearing the same expression. They nodded to one another, one polite acknowledgement and she turned her back on him to lead the way. He listened intently to the sound of their footsteps falling in and out of rhythm with one another, to the buzzing of the overhead lights.

"There's been a kidnapping." Shizune didn't look at him while she spoke. The muscles in her shoulders were taut. "You've been personally requested."

"Mission class?" he murmured.

She hesitated. "A-class." Then after a moment, "This will hit very close to home, Neji-san."

There was a terrible cold settling in his stomach that he couldn't decipher. He felt something horrific was about to happen, this kidnapping…a wretched thought was forming in his mind, had been forming all the long walk here, but he refused to let it surface. Quietly, he closed his eyes and let the thought come forward; swamp him in the coldness of it, the lonely and delicious treachery of it. He opened his eyes again and they were in front of Tsunade's office.

Shizune was looking at him. "Are you ready?" She seemed to understand exactly was Neji was doing.

"Since I was born," he murmured.

The woman's expression didn't change, but there was a distant sadness in her eyes. She opened the door and Neji walked past her into the familiar organized chaos of Hokage Tsunade's office.

She was wearing her favorite green over-robe with the soft jade under garment, seated behind her desk looking all of thirty-five. Her real age was something like fifty three, but studying her long blonde hair as it hung about the harsh lines of her severely lovely face he couldn't catch a trace of gray. If he didn't see it, it meant there wasn't any. The color of her gaze was a shockingly plain mud brown, but so intense, so elegantly shaped it was hard to degrade it so. Her soft rose-colored mouth was pursed sternly, her fingers knitted over her nose so her eyes were leveled over them.

He gave her a very mellow look, masking the chaos with calm.

"You called me, Hokage-sama?" he said quietly, curtly. He pointedly ignored the presence standing on the wall to his right. He couldn't stop himself from swallowing convulsively. "Shizune-san said there was a kidnapping."

Tsunade did not look away. "Yes, there was a kidnapping."

Neji felt like he was being strangled slowly, but breathing evenly, calmly. He knew he looked mild and unconcerned, professional and unshaken. "When?"

"Today. A three-man scouting party of chuunin was attacked five miles inland from the borders of the Sound Country. They were not supposed to be that far north but it's suspected one of their more sensitive members detected something and they went to investigate. They were attacked by a man in an ANBU mask. Takeda Takeshi was killed, the most seasoned in the group. Most of Tamashi Maori made back together. He had a message…"

"'I have kidnapped your daughter and heir,'" someone new cited grimly, voice taunt like he might be talking through a lump in his throat. Neji closed his eyes, recognizing the voice immediately, having already recognized the chakra, having already recognized the man despite not looking. "In two days comply with our demands and she will be returned to you unharmed and untouched. If you do not, she will die. If you concede then send the payment to the Shoumai River by sunset two days from now. A single escort only. This is our single warning… '"

The head of the Hyuuga Clan looked up at him, his face expressionless now.

"She is in the Hidden Village of Sound, being held hostage." His eyes hardened. "They want _you_ in exchange for her, Neji."

Silence deafened them all.

Tsunade was watching him carefully, her dark eyes taking in his reaction, gauging it as she always did before giving him his missions. Neji took a slow breath, carefully organizing himself, steadying his thoughts even as they raged against his senses, fury, betrayal, fear, and doubt. Neji closed his eyes, but such a simple gesture brought no relief. He furled his hand briefly, clenched it then released it. He opened his eyes and forced himself to reason, but the only words getting through were a gleeful, macabre singsong: You're gonna _diiiiie_! You're gonna _diiiiiiie_!

The teenager couldn't stop the strange stillness that fell over him. All he could do was look at his uncle and listen to the thrum of his blood racing frantically through his veins, the panicked, erratic pulsing that didn't reach his face, didn't make it to his features. For some reason, through the acrid sulfur chemical cocktail inside his gut, there was a sudden twittering need to laugh. Like desperate butterflies swarming his belly he needed to double up on his knees and start laughing.

After all this waiting, all the angsting, all the hemming and hawing and it was finally, finally unequivically _here_; that thing, that one master fear that plagued every member of his domesticated branch of the Hyuuga family tree. That, in the end, every single one of them was nothing more than a substitute meant to take the blow for their more fortunate relatives. Nothing but a human shield. A strange disconnection part of him kept ticking off facts, kept making observations – _'Why would the Sound want me specifically?', 'Is it a ploy?', 'Will Tsunade want me to infiltrate?'_ – and other useless nonsense.

In the fore of his mind the same unwanted impulse over and over and over. He wanted to jump up on the table, kick the paper work off Tsunade's desk and scream.

But he didn't. Just like every other psychotic, erratic, unspeakable compulsion that riddled him and every other member of the Branch family, he didn't do it. He just nodded.

"I'll do what I have to."

"I have every confidence," said Hiashi, his expression unreadable, "that you will."

**Author's Note: **

_Honestly, this is a slow moving fic as far as most of my Naruto musings go. And thank you to the readers leaving their thoughts behind in that little review box. It gets no love these days. This fic has been oodles of fun to write so far, let's hope my inspiration lasts. Next chapter: fear of opening your eyes. _


	3. Optophobia

**Optophobia**

* * *

_: fear of opening your eyes_

* * *

_**Mission Type: **compromised retrieval_

_**Class:** A_

_**Date of Action: **October 5_

_**Assigned Operative: **Hyuuga Neji (jounin)_

_**Control Operative: **Namiashi Raido (jounin)_

_**Briefing: **N/A_

_**- - -**_

The truth was – though he had never before brought this to the attention of his care-givers – Neji's Byakugan didn't necessarily have to be fully active to see through things. That said, Neji had never deemed it prudent to make mention of this fact, not because he feared they might wish to exterminate such a deficiency ( it was more of an improvement) from the Hyuuga line, but rather that they might wish to replicate it. His clan being prone to self-destruction as it was, he didn't think they needed the prompting.

On a more personal level, the prospect of another person possibly alike in mind and body to himself scared the living day lights out of the prodigy. Hanabi was bad enough and that was without anyone suspecting, anyone knowing of the strange and undeniable _defect_ in him. A Hyuuga prides himself on understanding his own strengths (and his '_occasional' _weaknesses) and Neji knew it _was_ a defect.

One of the major disadvantages to the Byakugan was simply that an enemy ninja deciding whether or not to come in for close combat is mostly likely gonna take one look at a Hyuuga's face, scream 'Screw that!' and sprint back to kunai throwing distance.

Suffice to say, Byakugan activation was pretty obvious and – to be honest – somewhat unappealing. The white eyes are conspicuous; the throbbing veins of chakra are damn hard to miss.

Most Hyuuga couldn't see things better than 20/20 without Byakugan. In addition to 'seeing-through' at will, Neji saw something like 15/20 and only half-listened to what people said because he read lips on instinct. A useful trait frowned upon by most Hyuuga. The Uchiha were notorious lip-readers; therefore, no Hyuuga were encouraged to learn the skill, much to the irritation of the Hokage. Among other things, Neji found with practice he could focus chakra enough to 'see-through' without fully activating (at which point Byakugan gets creepy). The 'other things' had served to thoroughly befuddle his relatives and give Neji stomach ulcers.

But back to that defect.

Neji's problem laid in the biology behind this wonderful doujutsu upgrade, that it is, in fact, somewhat overwhelming for the eyes and brain to coordinate that kind of sensory ability. Sure, it made reconnaissance a bloody walk in the daisy-strewn park, but Neji didn't think a generation of freaks would serve the Hyuuga well. The splitting – debilitating and utterly excruciating – migraines aside, Neji's depth perception would simply vanish from time to time. An optical illusion he was usually (dangerously) unaware of until he missed the first step up a flight of stairs (or ran into an enemy ninja he was _certain_ had more of lead on him.) He'd long since then, learned to detect it, but it was a danger he feared would one day cost him.

Today was that day.

And it cost him.

From a figurative point of view he just hadn't seen this coming at all. Not until it hit him in the face anyway. From the literal…well…

**_- - -_**

Hiashi briefed him only shortly, a relatively painful and perfunctory gesture through which Neji sat, staring with a kind of previously dormant horror at his uncle. He couldn't remember what it felt like to be almost on speaking terms with the man, though he'd been on such terms just this morning. The extent of his vocabulary extended to 'yes', 'no', 'I understand' and various honorifics as needed. Not getting sick and subsequently throwing up in front of the Hyuuga Head fast became a matter of will while Hiashi worked through the details with him. He kept swallowing and finding his mouth full of nonexistent cotton.

He managed to get out of the room without any sign of wavering, he was proud of that at least, no greater test of his acting abilities than that instant where, under his uncle's all seeing eyes, Hiashi asked him, "Neji, can you do this?"

"Yes."

One word, and in that word every lie, every deceit, every fraction of shinobi trickery that had gained him the ground he now stood on. It felt weird to lie to his uncle now. As an emotionally brain-warped genin he'd exalted in his ability to deceive even the keenest eyes, the eyes of the Hyuuga and the eyes of others. (Not Hinata though, he'd never _really_ tricked her, in spite of everything. They mutually read one another like windowpanes, whether they liked it or not.)

His head ached. His stomach ached. His chest – for whatever reason – ached too. _'Why?'_ He balked. With a slight shake of the head he took the question and flung it with merciless haste into the lower regions of his conscious to decay there until it ceased to plague him.

Neji spent the rest of the morning gathering equipment for his mission – the other one had been handed over to another jounin in light of Hinata's capture – letting himself fall into the familiarity of routine. Systematically he went through the checklists, the mechanical movements of preparation until he found himself staring avidly at the arrangement of weaponry and realizing he had nothing left to do.

He double checked everything.

As far as recall, Neji couldn't remember what he spent the rest of that morning doing or why. The blanks in his memory frightened him, but for one reason or another he couldn't bring himself to do anything beyond fret unnecessarily about the baby dragon that seemed intent on eating up the inside of his belly and bursting out through chest. He'd never been this frenzied (frenzied? Was that the right word? _Frenzied_?) about a mission before, never. Hell, when he and the other rookies had suicidally blitzed off after a pack of A-class Sound-nin he'd been more or less confident that whatever happened he'd come back _one way_ or another. For some reason that same infallible (slightly stupid) cockiness didn't apply now.

Why? Hinata. That's why.

That silly little girl with her baby face that refused to get any more mature even with two years to do so and he couldn't stop seeing that quavering little smile, that uncertain little turn of the lips. He couldn't stop seeing the flaws like a video run on repeat, with all her fallacies and inconsistencies blaring in his face in loud obnoxious lyrics, ugly singsong patterns.

She wasn't strong. He knew that much, she wasn't weak like she used to be but she was not prepared to handle a situation like this hideous new thing currently in the works. He couldn't protect her and save himself at the same time.

There was a storm of origami sparrows, wings tipped in razor blades and whirling crazily in his chest, tearing delicate rips in his resolve, letting it leak like blood, hot and acrid into his system. He hadn't let himself think like this in a long time, had pushed such things down and out of his mind whenever they clawed their way, ugly and rotting and so unbelievably unkillable back to the surface of his thoughts: _That little bitch. If she could just take care of herself for five damn seconds this kind of thing would never happen. What a waste of breath, what a waste of Hyuuga blood and sweat. It would be better to let her die…_

"I can't think this right now," he informed the empty air vehemently. "I can't."

And he couldn't.

So he didn't.

The Hyuuga prodigy wandered aimlessly until his disorganization took him through one of the ill-used side-doors into the branch family gardens. The unkempt twists of an ancient sakura tree bent up into an ugly angle near the wall of the compound, branches thick with leaves, having long since lost its petals, a thick layer of blossoms clotting the coy pond. Neji found himself standing against the trunk; palms spread against the bark while pressing his forehead gently against the rough wood, his bangs tangling in the grooves and splinters.

'_I want to save her. If they hadn't ordered me to, I would have done so behind their backs. I would have.'_

And that was true.

_Ahh, yes, but they _did_ order you, didn't they? That's the rub. That they assumed you needed ordering, they didn't suppose to ask you if you'd be willing to make such a sacrifice. They just pulled rank. As usual. As always. _

And that was, he hated himself for admitting, also true.

It just hurt. It hurt and that surprised him. Not the mission so much as the attitude behind it and only just then, staring obsessively into the runnels of a tree trunk, did he trace the pain to its source inside him. It wasn't that he had to save Hinata and that the mission was dangerously close to (if not completely) suicidal; that didn't bother him. It was just that he'd kind of grown accustomed to thinking that just maybe his uncle trusted him – did he dare _dream_, respect him? – enough to ask him. It hurt to be put back in your place after getting spoiled for so long, two years toying with the dream. It hurts getting knocked down a peg.

…which was stupid, juvenile and completely, utterly _selfish_!

'_Hinata fucking _needs_ me and I'm crying over politics?'_

Neji gritted his teeth, slamming down a wall of self-disgust between himself and the spider web of thought. He shut them out before he could cripple himself before he'd ever begun and instinctively he sagged to the ground, legs folding up underneath him until he was sitting at the base of the sakura. He closed his eyes, breathing. He fell into meditation by reflex, letting himself ease into the familiar rhythm of his own heart, his own chakra pathways laid bare inside his skin.

He was safe inside his skin, not safe inside his head, not safe outside his head, not safe anywhere else but inside the hot, racing lines of chakra threaded through him. He didn't dare take himself out of that, lest he drive himself insane with rhetorical what-if's. He tried not to dwell on the fact that, for at least a good portion of his life, he'd been more than reasonably certifiable. ("On the brink of pretty much freaking loony," as Tenten had once confessed. "I didn't want to say anything, because I was crushing like crazy, but you were kinda really messed up.")

'Kinda really messed up' did not begin to cover it, but it was as good as Tenten's tomboy, no-touchy-feely vocabulary got…for which he was grateful because Lee was touchy-feely enough for _twenty_ emotionally deficient teenagers. Neji laughed a little, the reasons for which didn't bear thinking about because who the hell laughs when they're about to get horribly killed or tortured, again, probably horribly?

It was just _then_ that it hit him – literally this time – and he never saw it coming.

Not that you ever do when it's a missing-nin.

A hand slammed over his mouth and yanked him to his feet, pinning his head against the tree with such brutal force that black galaxies burst into being inches in front of the young Hyuuga's nose.

But Neji hadn't made jounin at fifteen by passing out when unknown ninja attacked him willy-nilly. The same instant those black nailed fingers dug into his face, he slammed both hands hard into his opponent's gut, a burst of white-hot chakra ripping through the dark red and black robes, scything meanly into delicate internal organs that suddenly were not there because the attacking ninja exploded in a 'bamf' of smoke.

Byakugan came violently active, second lens recoiling into the optic cavity and the world filtered into chakra spiked white and blue-black omnipotence.

'_I see you.' _

Neji flicked two handfuls of lethal black senbon into his hands, spinning and hurling them – blazing blue-white chakra – at the figure who'd been looming there for God knows how long. The intruder blurred and vanished, taking three of the air-borne senbon with him. Chakra flared up, his arm up and fast blast of chakra knocked the same three senbon away as they came zipping back. A kunai sliced at his throat but Neji saw it coming. Snatched the offending wrist and thrust his palm forward, aiming for the vital organs under his opponent's unguarded sternum because _real_ Juuken kills in one hit, not one-hundred-twenty-six.

However, his opponent – it seemed – was no stranger to hand-to-hand combat or Juuken. The other ninja yanked Neji's other arm hard across his body, putting Hyuuga's aim off and knocked his feet out from under him. Only by dropping his free hand to the ground and snapping his leg around in a reversing roundhouse did he stop his attacker from putting him in a death-choke. His world was roaring, blurring, black and white and see-through.

The grip vanished and Neji rolled up, somersaulting to evade the thrown kunai, hands plunging into a secret cache of senbon and hurling them into the air where his opponent will be. Out of the four: one caught the man in his the shoulder, stopping him and sending a spit-fire blaze of chakra through dormant nerves, setting off entire networks of pain receptors his opponent never knew existed in all likelihood. The shinjutsu needle was pulled free without a complaint but Neji was already unleashing the second wave.

Not many people knew he used senbon, because not many people lived through having a seven-inch needle through their eye.

(One is not teammates with Shomoto Tenten without learning _something_.)

Nevertheless, his adversary was no a stranger to good aim either and a kawarimi and a Kage Bunshin later, Neji was down another load of projectiles weapons and _running_ because his opponent's hands beneath that shapeless robe were flying though hand-signs, deadly, lightening fast – so damn _fast_! – flickers of movement. All at once, the entire koi pond heaved, boiling out of its banks into a single, glistening liquid tendril.. Neji watched it swaying and coiling drunkenly, waiting. Then it lashed out. Kaiten stained the gardens briefly aquatic blue-green as violently rotating chakra collided with the watery asp and ripped the jutsu apart.

Heavy rain fell briefly, watering the gardens and soaking the intruder thoroughly.

"So you've had ANBU training," remarked the interloper softly. "So there is that at least."

Ignoring this ambiguous statement, Neji faced his opponent and slid into that dangerous trademark delicate fighting stance, arms flung out in that slanted symmetrical diagonal that so terrified most non-Hyuuga opponents.

'_I can't miss,' _Neji thought, the words strained even in his head. _'If I do…it's over.'_

The man was in range. Neji exploded forward, blitzing into the man's unguarded front so fast even he was dizzy with the speed. Unhesitant he hurled into the Sixty-Four Strike, the first two blows slamming home under the interloper's collar bone, injecting hot chakra like poison into those shining blue pinpricks. The Four-Strike didn't quite land correctly and the Eight Strike ended as more of a three-strike and in horror, Neji realized – arms blurring, moving faster than the human eye could follow – that his opponent was _dodging_ his Juuken.

Neji, in his history as a shinobi, had run into lots of opponents well equipped to handle his Juuken. He'd never, however, run into an opponent capable of out and out evading it. Not this close. Never. This didn't bode well for the foreseeable ending of this fight.

Doggedly he redoubled his efforts, moving fast he he'd ever moved through a Sixty-Four Strike, but for all his struggle managed to land only a third of the blows needed to stopper chakra and none of the vital points. The young prodigy retreated to a safe distance, panting. He felt exhausted, his whole body aching wildly though his antagonist had yet to really strike him. In a burst of red-hot frustration he realized the man wasn't even _trying_ and if he didn't do _something_ right freaking _now_ he was doing to _die_. Fast.

Neji lunged back and landed again in Jukken stance, this time sliding his arms to that even more dangerous angle. Limp black bangs slithered down across his eyes, obscuring the sigil on his forehead protector. He'd never used this attack on another human being before, a giant swarm of spiders, in a panic, out-classed and out-matched, yes, but never on another living, breathing, member of his own species. (Not that he had a problem experimenting on this particular member of the human race.) He started to move –

The man held up a hand.

"That's enough, Hyuuga-san."

Neji obeyed out of simple surprise.

His opponent wasn't exceptionally tall, or at least, not much taller than himself. In the dark it may have been difficult to discern color, but Neji managed to construe the field of his cloak was black and the clouds printed on it a bloody scarlet, despite his adamant wishes for them to be another color ( green for example or marigold yellow. Just not red). The newcomer slipped a hand through the collar, pulling the top two buttons open twin snapping sounds and tugging it down from his face (eerily young) and lifting his hand to brush uneven black bangs from his eyes. From his right ring finger glittered a bright garnet stone. The kanji read 'scarlet'.

The lines of his face were uncompromisingly gentle, (a paradox only God could justify) his bland expression lidded his eyes, softening the thin, unmoving curve of his pale mouth. Delicate bone structure lent him an almost effeminate look, one that might have earned him some grief or admiration if not for the sheer psychotic _indifference_ those eyes. There were dark lines etched below those eyes, grooves drawn in by heavy doujutsu use and three inky tomoe swam in the red rings of each eye, deadly and familiar.

Uchiha Itachi was standing in front of him.

He never saw _this_ coming.

"Why are you here?" he whispered.

"Because it serves my interests," said Itachi mildly.

"What interest does Akatsuki have in affairs of the Hyuuga?" He gestured vaguely away. "I thought you were occupied kidnapping people in other countries. Am I mistaken?"

He knew Tsunade would undoubtedly crack his skull for speaking of that particular organization aloud, but when facing a member of said organization it seemed prudent to at least _pretend_ to know how much shit you were in.

The murderer of the Uchiha clan merely inclined his head, eyes narrowing minutely. After a moment he said, "The interests of Akatsuki are separate from my own tonight, a mercy for which you should be grateful, Hyuuga-san." Those awful eyes glittered. "Otherwise, for knowing that name, I would have been obligated to cut your throat."

Neji stopped breathing.

A beat.

"You're shaking, Hyuuga-san."

Hands battered by years of Juuken coiled tight to hide the tell-tale tremble, only to immediately relax because instinct knows you don't do Juuken with a clenched fist. Neji choked down the miscellaneous emotional cocktail boiling in the back of his throat and managed to maintain the cold in his expression. He reached up to push his hair from his eyes, not because he couldn't see, but because his bangs were tickling his aching lips, bruised from the initial contact.

Once he regained control, he went on.

"What interests?" murmured Neji, clenching a hand at the back of his head, fisted unseen in his hair. "If they are your own, then an Uchiha should have even less reason to care about the fate of one Hyuuga. Again, why are you here?"

Ghost swarmed in scarlet irises. "To repay an old debt," he said.

Neji stared, talcum-powder eyes blank. "_What_?"

He was silent a moment.

"I wouldn't have picked you for ANBU," Itachi remarked at random.

The Hyuuga blinked.

"I would have made you a hunter-nin."

And because there was nothing to lose by asking, Neji asked, "Why?"

"A hunter-nin is the only branch of ninja," he said simply, "allowed to murder members of their own village."

"What do you _want_ from me!?" The question was a little too frantic for his taste.

"Your cooperation," the missing-nin replied neutrally, "You need not understand. Just obey."

Neji glared. "No."

'_One-Hundred...'_

"You're mistaken."

'_Twenty-Eight…'_

Bloody eyes flitted up.

'_Hands of…'_

"I'm not asking."

'_Hakke!'_

Neji flickered …then he hit the missing-nin fourteen times.

Split seconds click by in bloody bruises. Neji struck over two-hundred-fifty pressure points in less than two seconds, blood welling beneath moon-pale skin. As he blitzed through a world caught in fast-forward, for just an instant he felt his pulse temper down, his blood chilling freeze frame in his brain and the Byakugan show him the world standing still. His vision was swimming. Bright pin-pricks glittered through the dark, a myriad of tiny, shining targets. Rapid-fire, his hands ripped into unguarded veins of chakra.

Too fast, like his hands have been dealing death while he's not looking, the two-hundred-fifty-fourth strike slammed the heel of both hands into the missing-nin's chest, unloading a shotgun explosion of chakra into fragile ribs and the rest of the world caught up like a car crash. Itachi shot backward, slamming into the base of the sakura tree like a broken marionette hurled against a wall, all whiplash and crack. Then he slumped to the foot of the trunk…

…and melted into a formless ooze of mud and leaves.

"_Bunshin!_" Neji hissed, disappointment tearing the word from his clenched throat.

"Your fighting style…" said a voice dispassionately.

Neji spun, dark hair whipping around his shoulders, wide-eyed, disbelief shocking all sensation from his body. The Uchiha was standing behind him, looking like he'd been standing there a while, _waiting_.

Itachi regarded him blandly. "…it's familiar."

The question swam in his ivory stare.

"You paused just a fraction before you attacked," explained the renegade. "I made the switch then."

He shifted his stance, letting the loose cloth of his haori slither over his wrists and past his fingers. Chakra flared out through him, hissing down his hands and pooling like warm venom in his fingers.

The Juuken prodigy snatched a load of shinjutsu needles from his hip holster and hurled them at the Uchiha and, using them as cover, blitzed a lightening-fast zig-zag across the dirt. Itachi met him half-way with a kunai. Sparks spit off the metal as they strained against one another, hands shuddering with the force of their pressure. Neji's entire body shook with the effort of attacking after such a heavy Juuken assault. Adrenaline and chakra making his hands hot and his eyes swim with heat-lines that didn't exist, but he didn't care.

"There's hatred in you," Itachi remarked easily, gazing down at the young Hyuuga, "but not enough."

He paused, as if for an instant thinking back to some blood-soaked memory. Moonlight broke into shivering white fragments in the water nearby. Quite suddenly the rogue shinobi had his mouth against Neji's ear, murmuring through his hair.

"I would have killed them all much sooner," he whispered harshly. "What are _you_ waiting for?"

Neji recoiled.

"I'm _nothing_ like you!"

"No. You're not." Itachi blinked. "You're like _him_."

Then Neji's legs buckled. He dropped almost elegantly to his knees, looking ridiculously startled. His eyes warped, his head _screamed_ and the Byakugan blurred and distorted like a picture lacking depth perception. Numb, white spots swarmed in droves before his eyes, and he doubled up, stunned and deaf but through it all, like a radio signal through static, his own voice came through:

'_Genjutsu. Good job. Now he can kill you casually.'_

His stomach was clenched up, forcing acid, little dragons and an ocean of razor-blade origami up back of his throat. He couldn't move, he couldn't fight, he couldn't get free of this and he couldn't even figure out when the illusion had hit or in what manner it had broken in or how he hadn't, just _noticed_. Standing was like telling his legs to move with telepathy and no muscles. Nothing reacted. He felt sick. He'd lost control. He was _afraid_ –

Itachi was watching him, unconcern in every line of that too-gentle face.

"I don't need eye contact," he explained blankly, almost gently.

He reached down, taking the paralyzed Hyuuga by the throat. He shoved Neji back against the sakura, trunk slammed between his shoulder blades and somewhere in the back of his jutsu locked brain he remembered he'd forgotten to say goodbye to Lee or Tenten. Why the hell hadn't he done that?

"Open your eyes."

Neji shuddered.

"Your teacher taught you well, but it's useless now." (Once upon a time Might Guy taught his young Hyuuga student how to fight a Sharingan.) A warm thumb brushed the corner of his left eye, tracing the scrunched crows-feet. (He said, "Close your eyes…and fight like usual.") "Open them." (And something about youthful exuberance.) "Look at me."

His eyes flow open and he was looking Itachi – now directly – in the eyes.

Through the Byakugan chakra was reversing flow in the missing-nin's body, bright beads of it spiraling through his veins toward his skull, gathering like two spinning suns in his eye sockets. The Uchiha's free hand was tangled in his hair near his left ear, holding the young Hyuuga's gaze forward, into the bloody maelstrom of his Sharingan.

"If you must blame someone for this," he said softly, "blame your clan. Blame your cousins, your uncle, your family." Itachi leaned close, his voice a murmur, humming hypnotic poison in the Hyuuga's head. "It was they who bred this obedience into you, not I."

The three tomoe melted into an inky swirl in Itachi's irises. Thin red capillaries threaded through pale sclera, chakra throbbing so powerfully the aura was palpable, the black congealing and warping into a perverse three bladed pinwheel. Neji didn't have it in him to do anything but stare it down as his death raced toward him in whirling shuriken clouds of red and ebon-black. Randomly he pointed out:

"You don't even _know_ me. Who am I to you?"

The other ninja didn't say.

"One month," said the Uchiha. "One month to teach you to hate. I expect you to do well. After all, you will be representing me, Hyuuga."

For the next ten seconds, there was silence.

**_Author's Note:_ **

_Hmm...haven't got much to say. Thank you so much to those of you that are reading, it makes writing a story all the more enjoyable to know there's an audiance being catered to. Speaking of which, for any really dire naruto fans, you cannot miss **Secondhand Faith**, by **Lellian**. Best writing and eye-catching plot I've seen in a long, long time and updated pretty much weekly. It's a crime if you don't read it. It's far better than this story, you should be there now. Go in fact. I insist. _

_Now...seriously. _


	4. Aphenphosmphobia

**Aphenphosmphobia**

* * *

_: fear of being touched_

* * *

Raido met him at the front gates of the Hidden Leaf Village looking pensive and vaguely uncooperative, like he might _not_ report to Tsunade after this one _or_ fill out the paperwork in proper format.

This cheered him for some reason and Neji managed a kind of grim smile as he drew near. The older jounin seemed apprehensive of this smile. He asked him seriously if he thought he needed anything else before they left, if there was anything at all he needed to do, people to talk to, equipment to grab, just anything to _do_. Neji's immediate thought was 'Get my affairs in order?' but realized he had no possessions of his own anyway and that was a moot point to antagonize over. He told Raido he was ready and they took off for the borders of the Fire Country.

Neji's mind was carefully blank, had been carefully blank all morning.

He couldn't face it yet; not without going stark _raving_ _mad_.

This morning he'd woken up under the sakura tree in the garden, completely alone and feeling surprisingly well, almost as if someone had administered some kind of relaxant or sleeping jutsu. Refusing to think about it for the sake of keeping face, he got up and gathered all his fallen senbon needles, not bothering to touch the kunai scattered in the grass. They didn't belong to him and he didn't want them. He _did_ pick up his forehead protector though, knotting it in place. (When he'd lost it, he couldn't recall.) His skin had the unpleasant stickiness that came with sweating profusely. He didn't remember doing so last night, so he presumed it had happened while he was unconscious, some side affect from…from…

Neji pushed thought away in favor of taking a shower.

In the hot water he experienced his first minor break down. The crash down as he thought of it. Where all those fragile lies you've been convincing yourself of _– 'I'll be fine' 'It's not as bad as it seems' 'That didn't really happen' 'It was just a dream' _– suddenly plummet all around you and there's nothing but the honest ugly truth:

_Not only are you gonna die, you're gonna die crazy, kid._

It was a familiar kind of distress; he'd experienced it before on different missions. Realizing through no fault of his own the rest of his team had somehow been completely incapacitated. To finished the mission alone was basically suicide, but crucial to the survival of some fifty odd men women children. ('_In the end weren't they all strangers?'_) In his time as a ninja Neji had come to realize while some deaths are better than others, there are really no glorious or dignified endings in the shinobi trade.

Usually there is just blood in the dark.

…or a smoldering black char mark. Those were popular too.

The sun was starting to dip into the fall of the mountains as they came toward the Shoumai River, one of the only physical borders between the Fire Country and that of the Sound. Neji pulled up sharply before they broke the tree line however, halting on a high branch. Raido turned around, having already leapt to the next tree. Neji could see something like apprehension in his gaze, a kind of painful determination.

He imagined some commands had been issued in this regard, should Neji attempt to run, he was probably under orders to incapacitate him and turn him over for Hinata. (It was a grace he was being handed over conscious at all.) Whether Raido would act upon those orders depended on his experience with breaking them. If he was anything like Guy, he would probably carry out the order for the greater good and beat the hell out of someone in retribution later. If he was anything like Naruto, he'd just try to talk him out of it... _then_ beat him senseless.

Since he was Raido he waited.

(Briefly Neji wondered if he was the stronger ninja now, if he could really escape, but dismissed it as unnecessarily deviant.)

Neji didn't try to run. He reached behind his head and unknotted his forehead protector. Raido frowned, not commenting while the young jounin loosened the cloth and let the metal plate slide down over his eyes. Across his forehead he'd wrapped an extra black headband to replace the forehead protector, hiding the curse seal. The Hyuuga re-tied the cloth, higher and more tightly at the back of his head this time and lifted his face, now effectively blindfolded. He leapt to the next branch, landing neatly beside Raido who crouched down beside him and frowned out across the shining ribbon of water. He glanced up at his blinded companion. Neji ignored him.

"There a reason you did that?"

"Yes."

"A good reason?"

"Yes."

"Alright then."

The two hopped down to the grassy shore and began the slow process of walking toward the river. The method for this had been carefully instructed. Raido stood parallel to him some fifty meters off and they were to stop at the shore where Neji would proceed on foot from there. The river ran in a slow, steady current here, deep enough to be called a kind of fat pond, perfect for the task of walking across.

Neji quietly activated the Byakugan, the familiar tension at the corners of his eyes and behind the retina coming with a strange sense of both comfort and that guilty, excruciating feeling you got when you did something unforgivable. His eyes found their man immediately, a radiating pillar of chakra almost eclipsing the smaller, fainter figure of his cousin.

The familiar shape of her sent an immediate pang through his chest, then something dark through his gut. He nodded at a thicket of leafy trees across the way, indicating their position to his companion whose eyes flitted his way, indicating he understood. At fifty meters that might have been a bad signal for most partners, but he knew Neji's eyes very well, though blindfolded was a bit new to him.

The younger Hidden Leaf ninja stepped out onto the water just as the Sound ninja emerged from the copse, Hinata walking in front of him. She seemed unhurt, her hands bound behind her, with what looked like a paper Chakra Seal stuck to her jacket front. That explained the faintness to her aura. Neji started out across the water. Hinata's eyes, unexpectedly narrowed and determined as she emerged, suddenly grew round and frightened at the sight of her cousin on the water.

Neji stopped less than halfway across the river, his eyes having already told him no traps waited. The pattern against a water jutsu was already bright in his mind.

"Send Hinata across," Raido shouted. "Neji's not going any farther until she gets in the water too."

The Sound ninja wore an ANBU mask and otherwise innocuous traveling gear, similar to the green vest and equipment Raido himself wore. He considered this shortly then pushed Hinata forward, saying something quietly to her that made her say something equally soft. The man laughed, shoulders shaking and she turned away angrily, face a mask of pain as she looked toward Neji. So they had told her the nature of this trade, her for him. He could see it in every line of her body, the horror of what was about to happen mingled with the fear for her own life at stake. This trade off, the privilege of life she'd never asked for.

'_It's not about asking_,' Neji thought abstractly.

She stepped hesitantly onto the water, swallowing convulsively. Her steps were shaky as she set out across surface, ten meters to his left and started crossing the river. When she reached the same place as he, Neji started across again, meaning to meet her halfway and pass her there. She was looking at him, _staring_ at him so hard that he felt his own gaze slide to her of it own volition.

Something crossed her face, a terrible, tormented expression and she suddenly darted off course, running at him, rather than toward Raido. He instinctively flicked three throwing needles between his fingers, gaze darting to the Sound ninja on the shore. Raido was also tense, hands up for a teleportation jutsu. But the enemy ninja didn't seem concerned. He just watched.

Neji stowed the needles and instead ran to meet his cousin catching her as she stumbled slightly running into him. She buried her face in his shoulder and Neji felt himself fight the recoil, begging – '_Please, please don't let her notice, don't let her sense it. Please! Don't let her find out…'_ – Hot tears dampened the shoulder of his shirt, seeping through his robes.

"No!" she sobbed. "You weren't supposed to come!" He pulled a kunai from his sleeve and cut the ropes on her wrists. Calloused hands (not the hands of a proper Hyuuga aristocrat, rough and scarred by puppy teeth and shuriken) seized the folds of heavy cloth at his neck, shaking him without conviction. He didn't dare move to stop her (his hands were unconsciously burning up) until she spent her anger and flung her arms around him, hugging him tightly and crying into his neck. "I told you I didn't want you to! Neji! I don't want you to take my place, you…you…"

She fumbled for harsh words and couldn't find any.

She preferred to dissolve into incomprehensible weeping instead. Neji wrapped his arms around her shoulders and placed his chin on top of her head. Even as he held her, his entire body reacted, adrenaline shooting through his brain, suffusing every vein with shivery awareness. His middle seized up, he had to repress the reflexive tension that laced his arms with the conditioned reaction, ingrained, trained, _branded_ into his synaptic reflexes – '_No! Stop! Just focus!'_ His breathing was getting fast and shallow, like his throat had begun to close, his extremities going cold. Paper birds fluttered through his stomach, origami edges scraping and pushing inside. He squeezed her and pretended he was doing it to comfort her.

"I'm sorry."

She wept harder. "Why?"

He didn't have the nerve to tell her. "You've got to go, Hinata-sama." He pulled back.

The girl snatched his hand before he could get away. "You stopped calling me that."

"You've got to go."

'_Just get away from me. Please…don't _touch_ me. Not right now, not while I'm like this, like _this_…'_

She clutched his wrist. "Neji!"

The Sound ninja stirred finally. "Hinata-sama," he called formally, almost sincere. "I told you the nature of the poison, you don't have time to exchange tears with your dear cousin."

Neji spun on her, perversely thankful for an excuse. "Poison?"

"Tsunade is the only one who can cure me," she whispered. Her hands tightened painfully around his, glistening tracks running down her flushed cheeks. "I have until tomorrow morning. I have…to hurry." She gripped his hands like she could save him by just holding them. "Neji…Please. You're m-my cousin. Please don't…"

"You have to go," he said urgently, spinning her toward Raido before she could tempt him. He couldn't let her waste time apologizing and trying to talk him out of this. She had to get to the Hidden Leaf; _now_. Neji pushed her, stepping back toward the opposite shore where Orochimaru's subordinate stood waiting. Raido darted into the river, catching her arm and tugging her back. Her face swung back to him, torn and afraid. He softened his face for her sake, though he wasn't sure if she could make it out through his blindfold. "Go. I'll join you after."

Raido scooped the girl up, glancing at Neji. He nodded once and took off. Before he fluttered out of view Hinata's face over his shoulder contorted in despair, her hand extending toward him, then they were gone. Neji felt his comrade's presence and that of his cousin fading toward the Hidden Leaf. Relieved he turned back to the opposite side of the river. He wasn't exactly sure why he was relieved, he'd like to think for the sake of his humanity it was the joy of seeing his cousin safe…mostly he was just too scared to look her in the face.

"You know," the masked shinobi said calmly. "Lady Hinata was adamant that you would not come. That you were too valuable to be traded in for her…even while I gave her the poison she was certain." He pretended to pause. "Perhaps she over-estimates your worth, Neji-_kun_?"

Neji turned on him. "I'm planning on breakfast at home tomorrow. Let's make this fast."

He flicked four readied senbon needles into his hands and flung them, whistling with their speed. The man dodged them narrowly and landed on the water some feet away, chakra flaring at his feet to hold him on the water's surface. He seemed to consider the best way to come at the younger fighter. Tilting his head, the ANBU mask revealed nothing.

Knowing he had seconds, Neji dropped to a crouch, spreading his palms against the river's surface and leaking his chakra into the water like an iridescent dye. His hands flew through a series of seals and with a flare of chakra, the river suddenly burst into a cloud of thick mist, rolling out in a creamy mushroom front of vapor across the water. Smokescreen in place, Neji waited for his opponent, Byakugan piercing the fog.

'_There_.'

Neji hurdled three senbon needles into the mist, unblinking. Two hit home in the right shoulder, one striking the paralyzing pressure point, the third needle having struck the dead centre of his mask's forehead. There was a broken noise of startled pain and the crack of plaster. The clay disguise shattered, sliding from his dripping features and revealing the pale face of the man really beneath it. His eyes were a plain hazel color and his hair tarnished silver, but that was just distinctive enough for Neji.

Yakushi Kabuto: BINGO Book bounty-head and spy extraordinaire.

_'Dammit.'_

"You're not bad with water jutsu." The traitor hissed softly between his teeth, sliding the two needles free of his limp arm, paralyzed and unreactive. "But a thin mist and elementary element manipulation isn't quite up to par, I'm afraid."

Intent on the damage, Neji ignored the dig and pulled two more needles from the cache in his black waistband. He snapped out of perception, molding chakra to boost him through space in a blinking and hurled the second round of needles, both taking his unwary opponent in the throat and he went down on the water. The Leaf-nin landed some twenty meters way, puzzled and uncertain because dead and dying people looked differently than Kabuto did just then.

Neji felt something was wrong.

He hadn't even tried to dodge those.

Falling back to a safe distance, he wondered if he should use some chakra to power his senbon needles. In theory he could knockout sections of the chakra system that way. Kabuto was getting to his feet. He didn't _look_ mortally wounded. Then he started pulling needles out with a kind of cool professional method, tossing them into the water at his feet where they sank. Blood spurted briefly from his neck, having punctured a major artery. Plain hazel eyes studied the blood with the unconcern of a medical-nin in battle.

Angrily, Neji recognized the technique even as it healed the wounded flesh, knitting over with new skin. This was going to make killing him a whole lot harder than he had the patience or the mental capacity for.

'_End this now!'_ an impatient part of him snarled. _'You cannot drag this out! Kill him and run!'_

Kabuto smirked, straightening his glasses with his newly healed right arm. "Hmm… This shinjutsu stuff is impressive, but it won't work on a medical-nin, not even one of those fatal blows you've been trying all this time. Your aim is impeccable, by the way." His eyes flickered. "But you'll have to do better, Neji-kun. Much better."

Kabuto smirked and his hands flew through a blinding pattern of hand signs. Neji gritted his teeth. He was moving faster now, he couldn't waste any time. Neji cut to the left, one hard step and shot across the water, blurring…and the liquid gave under him. Neji gasped, sliding, unable to get his chakra to adjust fast enough as Kabuto's second jutsu took affect, the water leaping out of the river and seizing the young jounin, tugging him hard under the water.

The world became a muted, blurry spectrum for an instant, the Byakugan struggling to adjust. The water pressed in on him, roaring in his ears as all sound waves did through liquid, crushing in on his chest. Then he could see the bottom of his opponent clearly overhead, as if standing on air. His hands were going through a foreign kind of seal.

Neji turned over underwater and kicked for the surface. Kabuto slapped his hand down on the water, ripples radiating from his palm which glowed greenly and chakra blazed across the top. Neji's hands met a barrier, slippery and elastic, spread across the entirely of the river. Byakugan revealed chakra blanketing the water, making it solidify. He crouched against the strange water-skin, inverted, and stabbed it quickly with a kunai but it didn't cut. Slashing furiously at it, the blade failed to get purchase enough to slice. Overhead, Kabuto was just watching him, smiling in a truly frightening manner. He made a cutting gesture across his throat and shrugged. He mouthed silently at the sub-merged Hyuuga.

'You need more training.'

Neji could not believe the amount of ninjutsu this man knew; he used at least three in a row that Neji had absolutely _no_ idea what the hell they were.

He was running out of breath. The rogue medical-nin was waiting for him to drown, once he lost consciousness, he'd pull him out and revive him. _'That's what you hope, coward!'_ Neji refused to let that happen. The kunai in his hands blazed, his chakra gathering in the metal, igniting it until the water boiled around it. He drew back and sliced the thin membrane open like a veil and the jutsu dissolved, allowing him to hurl the kunai at his frowning opponent. Kabuto lunged away as Neji pulled himself out of the water. Long hair sopping wet, clothes saturated, the teenager darted across the river.

Kabuto met him and Neji swung out to the right, striking at the man's left. Kabuto swept the blow away, letting the burst of chakra miss by inches, before swiping at the smaller ninja. He ducked neatly under the hook and pummeled a series of pressure points across his opponent's ribs. Neji slammed both hands hard against the ribs of his opponent, chakra tearing through the inner cavity of Kabuto's ribcage. The man was blasted back, sliding across the water as he managed to remain standing, though, not for long, Neji imagined. He'd blown out two major valves in the heart and collapsed part of his opponent's left lung.

Kabuto chuckled and shook water from his hair.

He didn't look dead. This annoyed the Hyuuga.

"Well, well. You're quite something aren't you?" he said with far more breath than deserving for a man with _half a lung_. Neji threw two needles, sharp and fast, spitting chakra and punctured two more chakra points, blood spurting. The missing-nin looked annoyed, but he _did not drop_. Neji decided to stop throwing his senbon needles as he was obviously wasting them miserably. "Well. I expected nothing less from the Hyuuga's prodigy. But tell me, before we go on, has anyone in your clan ever told you that your form for Juuken is atrociously _bad_? Really, it's amazing you hit anything at all."

And because he has a reputation to uphold, Neji flew into a furious Sixty-Four Strike. Kabuto, standing innocuously in range for the last couple sentences, threw his arms across his body to shield himself, but it was a half-hearted effort.

Neji slammed the first Two-Strike into his opponent's ribs so hard, the chakra ruptured something inside. He didn't stop; he kept on him, the Four-Strike, Eight-Strike, and Sixteen-Strike. Blood splattered the water, dissolving into the river's greenish current. Thirty-Two-Strike came in a blurred one-handed attack that took the Sound ninja all across the solar plexus. Kabuto was struggling backwards, his breathing a ragged sound, wet and wounded. Neji unleashed the last sixty-four strikes all centrally across his entire chest, sealing all chakra flow completely and the last blow he threw like a punch, the heel of his hand crashing into Kabuto's jaw. He felt it give.

Inwardly he smirked.

'_Tell me my form is bad _now_.'_

He went down hard, vanishing underwater and sinking out of sight, though the Byakugan continued to follow the man's coil system, throbbing faintly beneath the river's surface. Neji waited. His opponent emerged from the far shore, gasping raggedly and pulled himself up on the shore, coughing blood and river water. The damage was done, without chakra he couldn't possibly heal himself. Kabuto coughed, vomiting blood and lifted his face to look at the Leaf ninja. His glasses had been washed away in the second submersion and his eyes glowed a sickening reddish color. He smiled again, that twisted, fettered smile that alluded to some form of insanity, albeit a very clever insanity.

"Very good, Hyuuga-san." Blood poured over his lips and he had to stop, spitting it out. "It's something to work with."

He didn't even seem fazed. (If anything Neji felt as if the medic had _taken_ those hits.) He was tempted to say something to the affect of 'You're shit and I'm leaving' but refrained. Talking was something he'd stopped doing when it came to enemies, as it wasted time and his energy and it was more than obvious Kabuto wasn't the kind to fall prey to any words. Besides, that was more of Naruto/Kiba thing. Instead he turned his back on the man and walked right back across the river onto the shore. He glanced back over his shoulder. Not once had he actually set foot in the Land of Sound. He smirked. That was reply enough. Kabuto smiled back at him, coughed once and climbed slowly to his feet.

"Kabuto," a new voice said coldly. Neji stopped. The cant and tone of the words were familiar, though somewhat deeper since their last meeting, mature and unruffled. "That was quite a mistake, inviting him to fight so close. If you hadn't already gathered chakra in your organs, you wouldn't have been able to regenerate."

Kabuto laughed. "I suppose so."

The Leaf ninja was irritated to see him capable of breathing, much less talking.

"Though…I hadn't anticipated…his arms? Did you see it?"

"You're babbling," the voice said, bored.

Neji turned, water dripping from his hair, soaked through his clothes, his blindfold still hanging across his eyes. Uchiha Sasuke leveled a familiar red-ringed stare at him, eyes a thin, angular shape. His features were slight, almost effeminate, but like his brother those eyes made him too terribly murderous, too hard to be mistaken for female. His style of dress had changed since he'd last seen his former Leaf ninja two years ago. He'd gotten taller, maybe taller than Neji himself, his hair still black and jagged, framing a cold, calculating expression.

He ignored his wounded ally, who was coughing hard next to him.

"Hyuuga Neji," he addressed him formally, though his hands rested idly on his hips, his posture relaxed. He was conversational. "I recognize you from the Chuunin Exams." Those eyes took him in lazily. "Hmm…you haven't changed much." There was sarcasm in that last word.

Neji narrowed his eyes, though his new enemy could not see.

Sasuke waved a hand to his eyes, tilting his head. "Your forehead protector's fallen. Did you know?"

"Your friends are still looking for you, you bastard," Neji said at last.

The young Uchiha regard Neji with a _stare_, exuding killer intent. For a moment Neji anticipated a sudden attack, his fingers curling up to pull another set of senbon needles from his sleeves. The wind hissed through the trees, making a soft rustling sound, like a muted roar all around them and the other teenager sighed, lifting hand to his forehead in exasperation. The arrogance was nothing new, but Neji hadn't like it when Sasuke was twelve and it sat with him far worse at age fifteen. Sasuke smiled, his hair flinging across his eyes.

"Your choice in words is quite a mistake on your part," he said mildly. "You were rude last time too."

Neji glared. "Why would I be polite to _you_?" Said like 'dog-shit'.

Sasuke looked puzzled for a moment, gazing at the Hyuuga with wide crimson eyes. Then he merely shook his head. "I guess most people are polite to their betters."

For a moment Neji relished the thought of putting a not so Gentle Fist through the other boy's face. Above all he wanted to blame the rogue ninja, blame him for the horrible things that happened to him over these past seventy-two hours. If not for Sasuke, he could have at least come here and saved his cousin with a clear conscience, rather than looking at her and feeling the unfriendly need to vomit, or maybe pitch himself screaming to the ground. He seethed. It was a small, but consistent pattern: so far he hated every Uchiha he'd met.

"I don't see any," Neji retorted. His head ached too much to be original with his words.

"It's because you've got that blindfold on, Hyuuga."

"I'm leaving. If you try to stop me I'm going to fight you. Then I'll kill you."

Another cold, unfeeling look. "Let you go?" Sasuke leapt easily across the river, landing neatly on the grassy shore only thirty meters off, out of range for a Juuken technique. He gazed emotionlessly at the Leaf ninja. "You're misunderstanding. You're whole purpose here is to fight _me_, not Kabuto. Besides, I've always wanted to see what a Byakugan can do. I'll try not to mangle your face too badly. Kabuto will want to study your eyes, I'm sure."

"That you were ever a Hidden Leaf ninja is repulsive," Neji snapped.

Sasuke reached behind him and meticulously unsheathed a wicked black sword, thin and glittering mutely in the cool sunlight. His expression had taken on that emotionless slack, eyes lidded, mouth bland, no facial muscles bothering to move. He spun the blade expertly and leveled it at the young jounin. "Orochimaru says to kill you if you don't put up a fight. So, for your sake, put up a fight."

Neji fingered the edge of a single senbon.

"I'm through talking," he said.

And threw the needle.

**_Author's Note:_**

_Ha! More fighting! I'm probably stupid for having this many chapters be nothing but combat, but I so do love a good battle-scene. Next chapter: Byakugan vs Sharingan. I've wanted to write a scene like this for soooo damn long. Enjoy. Drop a comment. I love your feedback and complaints equally. (Lies, but I still appreciate my reviewers.)_

_Just to clarify, I am totally making up landmarks. Yes I am._


	5. Atychiphobia

**Atychiphobia**

_

* * *

_

: fear of failure

* * *

The clash between Neji and Sasuke immediately resulted in a couple small craters.

After the first needle was neatly dodged, Sasuke performed an extremely _mean_ fire-jutsu producing a jounin level ball of flaming death that Neji felt obliged to do something about. He had to double the radius of his Kaiten just to keep the heat at bay. Then the fire-ball ricocheted off the spiraling wall of chakra and took a chuck off the river's cliff face some two-hundred meters to their left. In the span of time it took for the subsequent debris to fall, Neji and Sasuke had already starting a frightening and impressive looking amount of running in complex zig-zags around each other.

Sasuke knew the danger of bringing his chakra system's tenketsu anywhere within range of the Byakugan's Juuken techniques. Juuken, in its purest form, was a commonly known martial art from the mainland from which the Hyuuga predecessors derived their more literal version. The head family had no inhibitions about teaching him a fighting style and he devoured the freely given knowledge. AKA: Neji was good at taijutsu.

Between the two, Neji was probably the _better_ hand to hand specialist. That explained why the Uchiha wasn't keen on unarmed combat. Like any other person he wouldn't risk getting his insides microwaved in a taijutsu contest. Likewise, Neji didn't fancy getting gutted on a sword, so attacking head-on wasn't gonna happen without a damn good jutsu to back it up. Problem: Neji didn't have good jutsu. It was hand to hand or nothing. Neji cut in; cat-like, but Sasuke remained forever out of reach, just beyond his fingertips, putting his blade up between them like a barrier to stop any ideas of getting in close.

'_He knows Juuken,'_ thought Neji irritably as the boy jumped out of range again, keeping beyond the field of Hakke. Then as an after thought, '_Damn him.'_

Sasuke unleashed another fire ball, this one less concentrated and more engulfing than the last. The Hyuuga contemplated at the speed of flight as he ran to give himself thinking room. Kaiten might just wrap the murderously hot flames around him and cook him in it. He needed another tactic. Neji experimented with a swift wind manipulation jutsu instead, beginning like a Kaiten but as an alternative of spiraling around him, he gained some speed and slammed to a stop, launching the spinning chakra charged air at his opponent. For all effects and purposes he sling-shot a small tornado at the rouge ninja. Sasuke, being an Uchiha and working with fire since he was small, knew exactly what was going to happen when air and fire collide and darted the hell out of there.

The tornado ignited; the entire thing erupting in a two-story tall twister of orange flame.

It spent itself swiftly, leaving nothing but scorched grass and smoke, smoke from which five Hyuuga Nejis leapt out. They all landed around Sasuke, each bristling with very real-looking senbon needles. Orochimaru's charge looked only dimly worried; his former teammates had once included Uzumaki Naruto, the boy famous for producing absurd numbers of his own likeness and having them swarm vaguely horrified opponents. The four jounin copies and their hidden blueprint lunged forward, each hurling or stabbing with their needles, flashing sharp and deadly in the sunlight.

This was about the time Neji decided the Uchiha Clan was secretly derived from some intoxicated Hyuuga and contortionist. Susuke twisted into an impossible position, one that required him somersault to the left, invert himself completely on one hand and somehow arch his back over the hissing flight path of three different needles. There was some kind of motion where Sasuke started kicking everything around him that wasn't air and needless to say three Kage Bunshin exploded almost simultaneously, leaving two very pissed off looking Hyuuga look-alikes.

The missing-nin righted himself with a nimble backhand spring and looked around, his thin black blade still in his hand, yet to be used. There was a thin scratch of blood across the side of his neck and he narrowed his eyes immediately at the twin with the bloodied needle. _'Damn.'_ Neji dismissed the clone, knowing Sasuke had already picked him out. In his mind he was already totaling his chakra against that of Sasuke and finding himself wanting. This wasn't a fight he wanted to start, but it wasn't necessarily a fight he couldn't get away from intact. If he just kept one step ahead, if he just didn't relent, didn't lose his focus then he could.

Barely…

Sasuke shot forward again, this time coming from head on, so fast that Neji scarcely had time to duck the straight fisted punch, shrieking and screaming like a flock of crazed birds as it tore narrowly over his head, the pure, unadulterated amount of chakra so great that the passing back-draft ripped Neji's head back and slammed him to the grass, his scalp tingling, a trickle of blood sliding through his hair.

Neji had never seen the Chidori in action personally before. Now that he had, he wasn't sure he liked it. He lunged out of the way before Sasuke could successfully put the spitting blue orb of lightening through his face, instead blasting a concentrated crater the size of Neji's torso into the ground, one that extended twenty feet deep. The long-haired Leaf ninja was up and running, darting around Sasuke, still holding onto his single senbon needle.

He threw it to buy himself thinking time, cranking out a quick set of Bunshin and running in sync behind the first, masking his location as three other branched off to attack. They were still at a stale-mate. Ninjutsu was out, obviously. Neji couldn't do any genjutsu on Sasuke as the Sharingan repelled them, but there were limited genjutsu that worked on eyes like the Byakugan, as few people understood the Byakugan well enough to fool it effectively.

Sasuke knew all the techniques Neji did. Probably more. He wasn't going to win with ninjutsu. Neji felt he was perhaps being toyed with. Undoubtedly Orochimaru had taught Sasuke ample techniques in his time with the young Uchiha, far more than Neji was capable of learning in all likeliness. It was common knowledge that Sasuke's true strength had always lain in his ninja techniques, the fact he was restricting himself from an all out ninjutsu assault said something.

The truth ran like a marquee through the back of his brain. _'Shit…he's going easy on me.'_

Juuken was his only option and that would mean close combat and that would mean somehow getting the Uchiha to hold still a second so he could engage hand to hand. Neji molded chakra quickly to his feet and doubled his speed, zagging away from a series of jounin level ninjutsu that had the bothersome affect of turning the entire meadow into a small mine field. If not for the Byakugan foretelling the tell-tale patches of chakra in the dirt, he would have probably died two-hundred steps ago. But he stopped worrying about land mines a moment and instead, he worried about the glittering ebon sword – _When had he pulled that kawarimi?_ – speeding for his throat. Neji's arms swung up and he blocked with two tightly gripped senbon needles.

Which were neatly sliced in two and Neji almost lost his arm. A partial Kaiten and a scramble save his life and he was facing his opponent again, heart batting rapidly against his ribs in retribution.

"Don't underestimate me, Hyuuga," said Sasuke, circling.

Neji pulled two more senbon from his sleeves. They flared with chakra.

This was bad. Even as Neji twisted, sliding away from the edge, he could feel the air itself split as it passed. That blade could cut through anything and a couple puny chakra-molded needles sure as hell weren't going to stop it a second time. He needed a new tactic _now_. Sasuke had the edge in head-on confrontation. Pride might have tried to protest, but Neji was better then believing he could take an Uchiha in a full frontal assault. No matter how fast he was going those mirror wheel eyes would pick him out and lay him low. Through the Byakugan the blade was everywhere, coming at all angles humming, hornet-like angry across the air near Neji's skin. Sasuke himself remained well out of arms reach, keeping his opponent at the other end of his weapon.

From time to time he could feel those eyes pushing through the Byakugan, trying to usurp his mind through suggestion but failing. He wasn't _him_; he couldn't do it without eye contact. Neji's palm turned the blade aside and barehanded he deflected, anticipating and pushing the blade inches off course, diverting its intent enough to escape with his skin intact. The black sword could cut anything, but Neji wasn't blocking it, just guiding it, moving it aside to spare himself the blow.

But hell if it didn't tax his energy!

Neji was reaching his limits rapidly. The sheer amount of chakra it took to block that blade was wearing out. _'Get some space!'_ Neji thought fiercely, throwing two senbon. _'Get away from that weapon!'_

Sasuke diverted his attention a split second to block and Neji's kawarimi put him right on the Uchiha, slamming down a straight-legged axe kick meant to obliterate the collarbone. It didn't matter. The heel of his foot collided with the fore of the boy's arm instead and he was pushed off then immediately chased, forcing Neji in a chain of hasty back flips Lee would have been proud to cheer. A Dai Kaiten shoved Sasuke back to a manageable distance and Neji wondered when _he_ begun to prefer long range combat to close range?

He had to calm down. Get a grip and think strategy. Quick kill. He never needed a quick kill like he did now – Sasuke would only play the cocky aggressor for so long – and the only way to kill quickly was Juuken.

He ducked a stab aimed at his face and was shocked to find himself in easy striking distance of basically all his opponent's tenketsu and furthermore most of his vital organs. (Neji might have grown up on the Hyuuga estate, but he didn't pass up freebies.) Chakra blazed through his fingers and he rammed the full length of his hand up under Sasuke's sternum, meaning full well to sever the inferior vena cava and aorta. What didn't get severed would most likely be cooked by the excess chakra. A sudden, unexpected and disbelieving voice pinged in the back of his brain.

_You're going to kill, Uchiha Sasuke?_

Then his arm went numb and Neji's hand spasmed like it was caught in an electrical current, stopping centimeters short of their target. It took him a full second to register that the funny blue light he was seeing _was_ in fact an electric current. Somehow, his opponent was emitting a lightening chakra from every inch of skin and Neji had, for all intents and purposes, gone and jammed his fingers in an electrical outlet. The pain and the force of the chakra repelled his strike, putting him in a very, _very_ bad position defensively. He sensed the blow, _saw_ the blow, but could do nothing to dodge and the hilt of Sasuke's sword cracked down the back of his head. Neji dropped like a ragdoll.

For a terrible moment he almost passed out. But his Byakugan told him there was a second attack, this time from the blade itself and his body flung itself away on instinct. Leaping awkwardly from the blade, it hissed narrowly after him, slicing diagonally across his lower back and spraying the grass with red. His body was pickling every inch of skin with pins and needles, his legs threatened to buckle with each step and every part of his body ached numbly. Somewhere in the back of his mind something murmured warmly for him to just lie down and die, to just go still and accept it. But another voice smothered it, a cold, emotionless efficiency trained into him like genetics, coded into his brain.

"_I expect you to do well. After all, you will be representing me, Hyuuga."_

'_Get up. Get up! Get up and move!'_

Neji kept his feet through sheer force of will and got out of range before his ringing head could catch up with him and remind him people who get hit on the head aren't supposed to run in straight lines. He realized about then he _hadn't_ been running in a straight line, rather a really precarious half-circle. His Byakugan – scrambled as it was from the head-shot – told him Sasuke was coming at him diagonally from his right flank, his blade angled to slide up between his ribs. Dazed, Neji fumbled to dodge, managing another graceless get-away by means of a high-speed burst that barely escaped the edge of the Uchiha's sword and landed him unpleasantly in the grass some twenty meters off.

'_That technique…'_

The missing-nin looked bored again. "I wasn't planning on using this…but you're more annoying than I thought you'd be." He raised a spark spitting hand, crackles of bluish light snapping all around his finger tips. His expression was deadened. "Your Juuken will never get through my Chidori Current. You're too weak, Hyuuga."

'_I don't have any choice. I've got to use it.' _Nejigrasped the edges of the Hidden Leaf head protector._ 'If he's really neutralized my Juuken, I have to…'_ In the back of his mind a thousand screeching words slammed up against his decision, roaring at him to stop, to reconsider, to _never use that jutsu_! But he didn't see another path. Maybe if he had more time to strategize, but he knew Sasuke wouldn't give him any. His stomach churned, aching as fluttering anticipation bloomed up inside him, cold slimy fear congealing into a heavy pit in the bottom on his stomach. If he used it…there was no going back. If he did it – Neji shuddered – then there's no taking it back. I'll have to face it… He started to pull the hitae-ate off.

Sasuke seemed unconcerned. "Are you certain? That blindfold is the only thing keeping you from my hypnosis."

The young jounin hesitated.

"It was quite wise to hide your eyes. The Byakugan allows you to see through it without fear of my Sharingan and you've trained against indirect hypnosis. I don't know who taught you how to fight against my bloodline, but one instant where our eyes meet will be enough." The black blade swung elegantly up, readied for the next promised attack. "I'll kill you. Not even your Kaiten will stop this blade, I promise that."

Neji hesitated. For an instant there was nothing but wind, nothing but silence.

Then he shoved the headband from his face and opened his eyes. The Sharingan and Byakugan locked and Sasuke's gaze immediately pierced his; sinking his influence deeply into the intricate synaptic routes all through Neji's brain. The Leaf jounin jerked, startled at the power of it, potent as any genjutsu, the prelude to a Sharingan induced illusion. He didn't have much time. He could feel his muscles atrophy, his reflexes slowing, his senses dimming as the power of suggestion invaded him. Seconds more and he'd be good as a puppet.

Heat rushed up behind his eyes, surging into the optical nerve, up under the double lenses of his Byakugan where the energy pressurized like a carbonated soda, building until it felt like someone had pumped liquid fire into the back of his eyes. When he thought it would destroy every fiber of sanity in him, only then did he let it go. The secondary lens splintered, like a fracture in dam and released it all, firing like an air gun through his head. The muted explosion shuddered through his skull as his anxious eyes discharged enough chakra for over thirty Kaiten in a single burst.

The pulse rippled the air, an almost sonic undulation through the air that the naked eyes could almost see, sending ripples across the grass, turning leaves on the wind. Sasuke frowned as the swell of chakra vibrated through him.

Neji jammed the blindfold back on immediately. Biting back the scream of agony, digging the heel of his hands against his eyes behind the cloth – _''It…_hurts_! He didn't tell me…it's so much…'_ Tears slid in hot beads down his cheeks as his burning eyes shut tightly behind the dark of his head protector. Sunspots blazed there way through his optical nerve, branding hot rainbow after-images into the darkness, sparkling through his vision. His Byakugan sight was shot through with needles, each one white-hot and bright as the streaks they cut through his eyes. Was it conceivable to cry blood? Though the pain he let loose as many senbon needles as he could aim straight, emptying his entire hip cache into the attack.

Then three things happened.

First, Sasuke – looking _bored_, that bastard! – started to dodge the first set of projectiles.

Second, his Sharingan deactivated and he realized that it wasn't the first set he needed to worry about, but rather the ten behind them that he suddenly _could not_ see.

Last, Sasuke got hit by a lot of flying needles.

The Uchiha didn't quite scream, rather issued a strangled growl, staggering back as crimson splattered the grass as his feet, gasping in surprise. Even from thirty paces, half-blind and in blistering _pain_, Neij could still make out the tell-tale give away: Sasuke's eyes were flickering, red struggling to come through, failing to.

"_You will have only one chance."_

This chance.

Neji snapped out of perception and attacked again, tearing a long kunai from his waistband and rushing the other shinobi. The sight of Neji's face (blindfold aside) was enough to get Sasuke moving, fast; despite the needles riddling his body and the agony they must have caused him. He cut the kunai in half, but the Hyuuga was on him before he could get his blade back up. Neji slammed it aside with a deft spinning kick, knocking the boy's arms wide and his revolving Sharingan, finally activating again, saw the whole thing coming too late. In his mind Neji was screaming, gloating, finally putting _fear_ in those Sharingan eyes was akin to ecstasy and he knew he was starting to crash.

Too much chakra, too much blood loss, too much hatred.

"_Not enough hatred." _

And suddenly Neji had never hated a creature more than he hated Sasuke. His eyes behind the Konoha head plate were burning again, lit on fire, eager chakra rushing up behind his already aching irises, begging to be unleashed again. Hatred so strong it became power. _"Lesson number one: Emotion is strength."_ It roiled inside him; a living thing, full of black fangs and spines that undulated and scraped the inside of his chest, scraping him raw. It was maddening, this thing in him, this black creature and he wanted to unleash it, had to get it out of him infect someone else with his disease and there was only one route.

Though his hands.

Neji transformed from a person to an incomprehensible blur and began to batter his opponent, index and middle fingers striking furiously. As his hands tore through the other teenager's tenketsu he felt strange, unlike anything else he'd ever done to a person before. He struck without feeling, his arms moving like separate, pitiless creatures, each blow another injection of hatred, the same toxin in his blood that was driving him to this. His opponent was reeling, staggering, jerking, slammed back with each and every strike. The electric energy jumped to stop him but its reaction time was not perfect, confirming Neji's theory: Sasuke was willfully controlling that barrier to parry attacks he foresaw with his Sharingan.

But the Sharingan had to see it first. Sasuke was looking ahead like Kabuto, staring randomly off in the wrong direction and in this quarter-second epiphany Neji realized the Sharigan's one weakness: It's full of blind spots.

'_And if he couldn't see that.'_ Neji flickered, stepped low and too the side, a half-moon slide and he was under Sasuke, behind him. _'He can't see this!'_

Neji's stance was horrific. Hyuuga Hiashi would have cried; his own father would have rebuked him and he didn't care. Forget the Sixty-Four Hands. The Chidori Current twitched then arced toward his movement like a precognitive, electric version of Garra's sand, desperately racing to defend the open spot. But it wasn't fast enough. Not faster than Neji's hands moving at the speed of the One-Hundred-Twenty-Eight Hands of Hakke. His warped trump card.

Neji hit him… two-hundred-fifty-four times exactly.

No Kage Bunshin this time.

The Uchiha was knocked back, staggered, reeling, his blade loose in his limp fingers, whetted point scraping through the grass. Under the skin, blood welled in mottled bruises ominously circular and spotting up and down his pale arms. His breath rattled, wet and ragged as he growled through the agony of it, thin features contorting, twisted and made forcibly mortal. Neji similarly was panting, breathing heavily, body strained to the bleeding edge of his limits, his breath coming in shallow mimicries of laughter: 'Ha-ha-ha…' breathy and strangled. His body, every technique geared for quick deaths, was not designed for stamina battles. His chakra was almost spent. He had nothing left and his world was falling into the melting world of blood-loss.

A younger Neji would have been appalled at this state, but the sixteen-year-old was not flinching now. He knew he had one more shot, one last chance, something the Chidori's defense could not repel from the vital spots. The Hyuuga expended one last burst of speed, one last and final blast of chakra burning like fire in his finger tips.

The Uchiha saw him move and lashed out with the Chidori, but Neji was moving faster than he could ever hope to do again and by sheer brute force got through. He was still out of arm's reach but that didn't matter anymore. With a shout Neji slammed one hand forward, palm straight at Sasuke's chest. For this attack, it was point blank. The lightening seared his palm, burning, numbing his entire arm but a blast could not be stopped by mere electricity. The Hakke Kuushou discharged his remaining chakra into his opponent's ribcage with all the force of small freight train, one giant burst of merciless power. He felt something give under his hands, calcium framework cracking and Sasuke was blasted backward…

Then Neji was screaming; an aching _guttural_ sound.

Sasuke's blade rammed straight through his shoulder.

'_I didn't…even _see_ him…'_

Sasuke's skin was a mottled blaze of blue-chakra and setting those tomoe-ringed red eyes on fire. There was blood behind his opponent's teeth, revealing the internal wreckage, the Byakugan showing the damage to the inner coil system that had activated the cursed seal on his shoulder. Black etchings were crawling across the Uchiha's skin like dark worms, blacking the white of his left eye until it was a pitiless black socket. Neji screamed again, a strangled, dying sound as the blade twisted; driving him to his knees. Fingers tore the Hidden Leaf head protector from his eyes.

"You won't need this anymore," Sasuke said softly. And out of pure spite, he tore the remaining headband from Neji's forehead, laying bare the Cage Seal hidden beneath it. "Or this."

Neji grabbed the hair at the base of Sasuke's neck and jerked himself close.

"Itachi says 'Hi.'"

Red eyes twitched toward him and there was more emotion there than any expression could have captured.

Electricity jolted along the length of the weapon, electrocuting him, setting every nerve in his body on fire. His head snapped back, his spine arcing into a grotesque parentheses and that raw, clawing scream burst out his mouth, garbled and sick. Sasuke followed him to the ground, straddling him and every inch of contact blistered and burned, filling his senses with the noxious stench of ionized air, Sasuke's blood, sweat, and ozone. He cried out, clawing, his body twitching, shuddering, curling and snapping around in violent random motion. Like it would stop it somehow. His skull felt like it would rupture, his nervous system shorting out, his blood heating, his chakra sucking away in the effort of keeping him alive. There was no end.

Worse of all his _eyes_... He was screaming, screaming until his voice was running out, until he couldn't taste, touch, hear or perceive anything.

Until the world splintered into nothing.


	6. Merinthophobia

**Merinthophobia**

* * *

_: fear of being tied or bound_

* * *

Neji woke in a panicked spasm to a well lit room that he didn't know.

For a moment he couldn't understand what the hell he was looking at (walls, ceilings, lines and depth perception were escaping him). Then the smell of bandages and a plant salve stung his nose slightly. That bleached scent of sterilized things and his panic faded into mute realization. For a beautiful moment he couldn't feel a thing. Then a familiar, unmemorable face drifted into view near his right shoulder, reaching across him to adjust some IV drip or another. Kabuto finished adjusting the apparatus, inspecting a readout on one of the machines nearby.

"You're awake," he stated plainly.

Neji swallowed. "What…time?"

"Too late for breakfast at home if that's what you're wondering."

He would have liked to say that wasn't what he was thinking at all, but that was a lie and his pride wouldn't let him speak anyway. The Hyuuga swallowed and turned his face to the other wall, sorting with methodical panic through his boiling thoughts. He bit back his emotions because those were going to do him very little good – he suspected very much he might be doped on something, the walls kept swimmingly nicely – and he'd just have to do without them. Logic. Alright. Facts.

'_I lost.'_

_You're a prisoner._

'_I lost to him.'_

_You're screwed. _

Logic sucked. Also, he was having trouble penning back his up and coming nervous breakdown (he blamed the drugs. Prescription pain-killers made him weird. As a result all Konoha anesthesiologists hated him). He squeezed his eyes shut, letting the unavoidable burn of panic rip through him like an electric current. Then he sank back on the table and somewhere inside something clicked on, or off, but clicked and the sixteen-year-old was smothered by the jounin. There was no panicking. There was no breaking. Calmly he took stock of the situation; letting his mind run through the categories in a neat, unemotional list.

All of his weapons were gone; every one of them but that was to be expected. His shoulder, he remembered, was supposed to have a charred hole punched through it – _'Tch, the same one? Again?'_ – but under the bandages it felt nicely whole. His lower back had been wrapped and his arms bandages from wrists to elbows. They smelled of burn salve, and felt stiff but no nerve damage as far as he could discern. _'The Current must be low voltage, else wise I would have been dead on the river.'_

Overhead some device was beeping helpfully, assuring him that his heart was still beating normally and despite the considerable stiffness, his shoulder felt remarkably good for being run through. The only truly _noticeable_ discomfort was the truly _horrendous_ pain lashing across the delicate nerve in his eyeballs. In all honestly, if felt as though someone was currently in the mood to shoot him in the eyes with a high-powered staple-gun and he snapped his eyes shut again with a slight, strangled noise. The throb worsened with every moment of consciousness.

The machine spiked slightly.

"Hmm, the medication is wearing out," Kabuto remarked, tone observatory and cool. "Are you in any great pain?

'_Yes!'_ "No," he gasped, struggling into a sitting position.

"Hmm, liar," concluded Kabuto. "I won't give you anything though. You need to be alert for this."

Neji fought a convulsion as another wave of pain hit him from the skull down. "For what?"

"You've been asleep most of two days," said Kabuto mildly, ignoring his question. "Sasuke-kun recovered some time last night…That last technique did more damage than he'd like to admit." He looked apologetic. "But I had to stop him from killing you with his Chidori Current. Much longer and your body would have been beyond repair."

"Why?" Neji kept his voice level. "What does he want with me?"

He wasn't talking about Sasuke anymore.

The Sound ninja shrugged rather lazily. "I'm sure _I_ don't know."

He didn't bother hiding the lie. Neji blinked watery eyes open, grimacing at the moisture it triggered from abused tear glands and he wiped carefully at the running water, careful not to rub his eyes lest the pain drive him into unconsciousness. Kabuto was watching him a couple feet off, face a neutral mask of polite attention that the Hyuuga found unnerving. Kabuto struck a funny chord in him. Neji felt that in a room of a hundred, Kabuto was the kind to rub him wrong from fifty meters off. (At the Exams Lee had once called him 'That creepy guy in glasses' proving once and for all Lee _did_ have some good instincts.)

"I don't know much about the Cage Seal," Kabuto was saying thoughtfully. "Obviously curse seals are a specialty of the Sound, but I'm curious to have a look at yours, see how it works." The med-nin was sorting through an array of hypodermic needles on a table nearby. "The best way would be cracking your skull open of course, but I can't be certain such an invasive technique won't activate the seal." He smiled ruefully. "We don't want you dead just yet, Neji-kun. That would be a waste after all the effort we put into getting you here."

Neji didn't say anything, just looked at the floor – or at least, directed his visible irises toward the floor – and pretended to have no comment. The doctor didn't seem to be awaiting an answer anyway. The young jounin felt goose-bumps trying to rise along his arms, an effect of proximity he supposed. Orochimaru's spy had a disturbing habit of saying awful things while his expression remained entirely pleasant. It was disconcerting for a person who more or less based all their social judgments on the tiny infinitesimal tics of the human subconscious, unconscious signals inherent in every human being.

It was like Kabuto didn't have them.

A shirt was tossed his way and Neji caught it reflexively.

"There's a bathroom on your left," the medic said affably. "Try to look a _little_ presentable, Neji-kun. First impressions you know."

He left, locking the door behind him.

"Unbelievable," Neji whispered. He made future plans to blow the Yakushi's head off with Juuken and felt his mood improve for it.

Then he went in the bathroom and locked the door (because locks do lots of good when you're hostage in an enemy base) while he changed.

Hot water roared into the basin, filling the contrary silence of the Sound and steaming the mirror with misty fingers groping up. With reluctance he found himself staring hard at his reflection in the dim light of the tallow candles. Even after he rinsed the dusty blood from his face, he looked haggard and insubstantial in the gloom, his eyes paler than pale in his already ghostly pallor. Swallowing, he leaned forward to see again.

Were those hair-line fractures really there, etched into the solid secondary lens beneath the iris, like the cap on the child-safe lid? The plastic protection chipping away? Light glanced off the new, tell-tale imperfections in his inner iris.

Swallowing he leaned nearer to the mirror, gingerly activating the Byakugan.

The familiar tension at the back of his eyes came easy, the peculiar sliding sensation as the secondary lens under the first iris recoiled into the inner eye and allowed the chakra stimulated optical nerves to see freely. He blinked, hardly even aware of the motion but beyond the dull ache that had plagued him since waking; his eyes didn't protest the use. Encouraged, he allowed chakra to filter freely through the tenketsu behind his retina. Slowly, slowly at first, in small amounts, allowing color sensitive photoreceptors in his eyes to deactivated. He hadn't done such a slow activation since he was three, training himself to understand his blood-line-limit.

Normal eyes have two kinds of photoreceptor cells; cones and rods. Cones see color and light variations. Rods function in darkness and detect shape and outline with acute detail. He knew the Byakugan's heightened perception laid in the art of deactivating all the cone receptor cells in his eyes and relying solely on the sensitivity of rods. Chakra augmented this sensitivity until the photoreceptors become so highly sensitive they sought light and visual information even beyond solid objects. Developed correctly those rods began to seek light from sources typically invisible to the human retina…like that of chakra, for example. Byakugan could therefore function in any lighting because it does not rely on normal light to see.

By the age of seven, every Hyuuga child could see through solid objects and perceive a coil system. Soon the user was looking not merely through the pupil (still filmed over by the secondary lens) but through the back of their own head, through every other part of their eye, taking in light even through the skull. The distinction between standard and strong appeared here. Most Hyuuga could only see 270 degrees around them and behind them. Those strong in the Hyuuga blood and disciplined in their training could achieve 360 degrees of vision. The distinction between strength and _genius_ appeared here.

There had been only five known Hyuuga in the history of the clan who could see and hit tenketsu.

Neji was one of them.

Neji grew up knowing these things, these biological facts about his own body that any ninja outside Konoha would kill to understand. But as he gazed into the mirror in that dusty bathroom, miles from the safety of the Hidden Leaf and the precious knowledge of his own clan, he found himself doubting his bloodline.

There were factures_ – fractures _– in his secondary lens. He could see them even now: fine, hair-line chinks in the usual smoothness of the inner circle.

Neji was scared quite suddenly, staring at his broken eyes in the mirror. He felt weak and uncertain, like a little kid sitting in the dark trying to see without light all over again. But his father wasn't here to instruct him, there were no affectionate words of advice, no reassurance that, yes, this was perfectly normal and every Hyuuga your age goes through this.

There was just the ugly gnawing in the pit of his stomach.

He wanted to rub his knuckles into his eyes sockets until the fractures went away but he knew they wouldn't. He deactivated his Byakugan, but they were still there, visible even to the naked eye. Unnatural and strange. A Byakugan _needs_ that secondary lens. It's this lens that prevents a Hyuuga from going blind when they activate hyper light-sensitive photoreceptors in broad daylight. Special pigments in the lens filter out the harsh color wavelengths of normal light and convert it to the needed blues and grays rods can perceive. The lens was a protective seal. To have the secondary lens damaged…

His fingers were shaking, his gut clenching and he wanted to scream suddenly for reasons that had nothing to do with Orochimaru.

'_Don't think about it. Just don't. Don't –'_

"_Lesson number one: Emotion is strength."_

He jerked his head down like someone bitten by a spider, shaking his head like he could dislodge it. _'No. No. Focus, don't think.'_ But Neji _was_ trying to think, to clear his head of the fog in his brain, shake off the disbelief clutching him, not letting him come to terms with his failure. (But how was it a failure?) Hinata was safe. The secrets of the Byakugan would not be exploited. Mission accomplished. Why did that make him want to scream and punch his arm through a wall? Malicious churning in his stomach marked the revulsion, the sickness and delicate shudders of adrenaline, heat surging up behind his eyes with knee-jerk familiarly at the thoughts of _her_.

That sickly-sweet voice in his brain leaned forward and murmured murder, hissing hatred, breathing blood – _"Lesson number two: Hatred and love are the two most powerful emotions."_ – and with a jerk and a gasp he shook it away, eyes clenching shut, dispersing the fire behind his cornea. Desperately he grabbed for better memories. He _needed_ better memories, he _needed_ to believe he'd done this for a reason or he would go mad.

He clung to Hinata's humanity – he didn't trust his own – her anxious need to express to him how much she cared (stammering, nervous and blushing), her rice ball recipe, the gentle caution as she tied his hair: Simple things to keep him sane. He cradled the memory of Hanabi's voice, how she smelled (soap and coconut flakes) when he passed her and the desperate, distant affection he'd felt, the fierce need to defend her. He recalled her giving in for the first time when he said 'no' to one of her requests, stepping down her bred superiority for once in her life, her willingness to try.

His cousins were his only quavering life-line. If he didn't believe that he loved them, that he wanted to see them again then he'd asphyxiate in the stale darkness of this place.

Neji slammed his hand against the wall beside his reflection.

'_I will not do what _he_ wants!'_

With a wrench he pulled out of his darkness and pulled on the shirt Kabuto had left for him, plain white and a purple rope sash (Neji pointedly threw it in the trash because, stylish or not, he could recognize a stupid piece of wardrobe when it crossed him). There was gauze on the counter in the adjoining room and Neji deftly wrapped his forehead in it, hiding the Cage Seal. This was business, the usual hostage situation, just another day at the metaphysical office. It wasn't like his job description hadn't come with the clause: May or may not be captured, tortured and dissected for the sake of enemy-nin science. Please sign on lines 3, 4 and 18.

Kabuto returned as he finished tying off the bandages and blinked at the fully dressed Hyuuga, as if he hadn't expected to find him here at all, much less fully dressed. He pursed his lips a moment. This suggested to Neji that his idea of 'presentable' and Kabuto's did not quite align, but he said nothing to that affect.

"Well, then," he said, holding the door ajar. "Let's go, Hyuuga-san."

They did that.

-break-

The halls were freezing.

Within minutes, Neji's jaw was locked up to prevent his teeth from chattering. Kabuto was either immune to the cold or, in a show of magnificent play-acting, ignoring it outright. His breath hung in the air as clearly as the teenager's own. Neji could make out distinctly the prickle of goosebumps down the other ninja's arms, the slight jump in his jaw where the occasional jitter of teeth threatened to give him away. Torches lined the walls; burnt out stubs but no one had gone about to replace them yet, letting the burned black patch remain as evidence of the former heat. Neji was starting to wish he had something heavier than the thin white shirt. Not rubbing his arms was becoming an effort of will.

Kabuto turned off without warning into an open archway and Neji followed him.

Warm air shocked heat back into his cheeks, kneading the chill from his skin as quickly as it had seeped in and Neji found himself facing a kind of sunken den. The room smelled of life, of people and activity; the phantom traces of previous owners still hanging like ghosts after the fact. Someone had made an attempt at decoration with a woven throw rug and erratic selection of five degenerating armchairs, scattered in a hodge-podge design about the room. A small television set took stage on what looked like a pile of old magazines and a foot rest with one leg missing. Another someone had inserted a flipped rice bowl to equalize the podium.

The jounin tracked the warmth to the left where Kabuto had propped an ancient looking oven open with a wooden spoon. He currently had one foot set against the counter next to the mouth of the giant baking appliance, his back braced against the immaculate kitchen island across from it. There was a set of barstools, some broken and toppled, arranged near the counter. He could make out the shape of several fist-sized holes in the wall and a hanging target board riddled with kunai. The room whispered of some kind of unity here, but only thinly.

"The lower atriums don't get warm until later in the day," Kabuto said, not looking at Neji. He was balancing a clipboard on his knee, writing with slow, unhurried pen-strokes. "Usually I wouldn't worry, but the medication from last night might have knocked you out too long. Then you'd never wake up. What a shame that would be."

Neji didn't move from the door, didn't venture another step over the already violated threshold. He lifted his chin just slightly instead, trying to gauge his guide without looking like that was what he was doing. He didn't believe Kabuto had woken him early to give him some time to get warm by the oven and he didn't believe that Kabuto really thought he'd freeze in his sleep. The little fact about the furnaces sounded about right, though. He still couldn't feel his fingers.

"Why is it so cold?" Neji asked quietly.

Kabuto spared him a cursory kind of glance. "Only the upper levels keep the fires stroked around the clock. The fires go out around midnight so it gets cold by the early morning. The servants don't kindle them again until eight."

"Orochimaru's rooms are in the upper levels." Neji left off the question mark pointedly.

"Precisely."

He played with the idea of mentioning cold-bloodedness in relation to reptiles, but the notion was curbed by a sudden lurching growl from his stomach. He swallowed, absurdly embarrassed and wondered pragmatically if Kabuto brought him here as some kind of visual taunt. 'I have access to food, but you're not getting any' kind of thing. But that seemed too low-class for him somehow. If the med-nin was going to mess with him, he would do it more subtly.

He wasn't sure why he figured that.

But sure enough, Kabuto spared him another look, lower lip thinning as if he were chewing it slightly in thought, considering him. He could see lazy wheels turning, contemplating the hungry teenaged Leaf-ninja, what to do with such a dilemma. Neji didn't let on what he thought about this silent appraisal and moved into the room instead, letting the heavy warmth steal across his shoulders in comforting waves. He took a seat at the stool at the corner of the bar and folded his arms on the countertop.

"So what's my position here exactly?" Neji asked.

Kabuto answered, "You're a prisoner of war for now."

Neji mulled that over.

The medic lifted his head suddenly as if to see what he thought of this. "It's only temporary," he assured the young Hyuuga. "I expect you'll be a full fledged Sound shinobi by the end of next month."

The sweet aftertaste of sarcasm in his words made Neji's throat clench, as if swallowing something sour. In the back of his mind his brain was already reiterating that statement, incredulous, disbelieving. He was lying of course. Not even Orochimaru would dare to dream he could force loyalty on someone, certainly not in a few months' time, but Kabuto's purpose for saying such a lie concerned him more than some.

A moment passed.

"Is it usual for the Sound to treat prisoners this way?"

"No. I said it before: you should consider yourself a guest, an exception. Not necessarily a good thing, you know. The nail that sticks up…" Kabuto trailed off helpfully, smiling.

Neji thumbed his sleeve, eyes never leaving the figure of the pale-haired shinobi just feet across from him. Yakushi Kabuto didn't seem to mind the scrutiny, he just went right on scribing his notes, all of which Neji immediately realized was in some kind of syntax code. Neji's sharp eyes picked out each and every meaningless character. There was a stack of papers at the far end of the table, charts and letters spread out with a kind of organized abandon. He matched the handwriting to the medic's. He ran his hand idly through his loose hair, pushing it off his forehead. The rough cloth wraps tickled his fingertips

"So you're forcing me into cooperating with the Sound's objectives?" Neji folded his arms, lowering his head slightly. "That I understand. But want makes you think you can make me a true member of the Sound?"

Kabuto only shrugged one shoulder. "You're just that type of shinobi, Neji-kun. You're a survivor and you're smart. So you won't do something stupid like try and resist what's so obviously out of your hands."

Neji narrowed his eyes slightly.

"One way or another you'll do as we require." Kabuto looked at him. "If not, it's going to be hard cutting your eyes out of your skull."

He issued the brutal threat with such casual ease Neji would have mistaken it for something kind if he'd only registered the inflection. The Hyuuga had to admire his methods of intimidation. It was better than anything he could have pulled off even after two years of work as a jounin. A digital clock on the microwave over the far counter said 5:55 AM. Was that really the time or was Kabuto messing with him? Did someone even think that far ahead? And what good is messing with a captive's sense of time? _'Or –'_ Neji grimaced _'– am I finally reaching critical mass and cracking?'_ It was an issue any spy dealt with. Judging where and when their good sense and field experience bled over into neurosis and paranoia.

Neji slid off the stool to circle the counter. He paused on the opposite side of the stove. The Yakushi didn't seem bothered by Neji's movement so the jounin reached experimentally into a partially open cabinet. When the medic didn't immediately say something, Neji elbowed it open and began to methodically rifle through the various boxes and bottles. As he sorted, he could almost see where someone had gone shopping with something like a reasonable shopping list, then given up and just packed the shelves with random culinary ambitions.

Neji was half-way through reading a number of expiration dates on a box of Mist Country spices when Kabuto finally looked up. "If you're eating keep it light," he said neutrally. "Or you'll throw it up." Then he went back to his scribbles.

There was a trace of hostility in those words. He found a protein bar with an acceptable expiration date and struggled not to look as _starved_ as he was finishing it off. Then he washed an apple and crunched his way through that, trying to decide whether or not the waxy taste was normal in an apple or if he was being insidiously poisoned. Kabuto wasn't saying anything. Neji counted out five stools about the kitchenette, implying the maximum occupancy that struck a strange chord in his memory, vibrating deep in his head, nudging a forgotten recollection. He chewed slowly, swallowing after a moment, mouth dry.

He recalled it now. They'd called themselves the Sound _Five_.

"Does this room belong to you?" Neji asked finally, coldly.

"In a fashion," he replied, glancing up at him through the silver thread of his bangs. He slid his glasses a little higher on his nose. "Why do you ask, Neji-kun?"

"It seems a little big for one."

The medic quirked his head just slightly, like the sparrows in his bedroom window, a curious little jilt to the left and he put the clipboard down on a pile of manila envelopes. A glance told Neji they were dossiers for chuunin, far too many to read through without looking suspicious. Kabuto made a show of warming his hands over the open range. "This room is for elite jounin only," the young man said blandly. His glasses caught the light until the lenses became twin mirrors, bright and inhuman. "It's something like the steak house back in Konoha actually. When the jounin have their get-togethers every other week or so. In the Sound, the elite come here."

Neji glanced down at the pock-marked counter, stabbed methodically with what looked like a blunt kunai. 5:59 AM. He ran a finger into a single divot.

"Kidomaru did that," Kabuto said suddenly.

Neji resisted the instinct to tear his fingers away from the battered tabletop. He kept his voice bored. "Really?"

"Jirobou was the cook around here. When Kidomaru got impatient waiting for him he'd sit there and stab the table." Kabuto furled and unfurled his fingers; inspecting them in the same manner Tenten might inspect her nails, but without any of the girlish motivations. He had an air of laziness about him almost, but not quite equal to that of Shikamaru. Neji didn't like the fact he kept drawing parallels between his fellow Leaf-nin and the strange medic. He decided he should really stop it.

Neji opened his mouth to ask –

"Kabuto."

The named Sound-nin stiffened ever so slightly, eyes shifting with more than lazy quickness to the doorway. Neji didn't look, through his peripheral he could make out the dim outline of another person stood in the entry, one arm propped against the frame, fingers trailing the edges of two ebon-dark eyes. An upward prickle of cold kissed its way up the curve of his spine and spread across the back of his neck into his scalp. The apple and protein bar were suddenly crawling their way back up his throat.

'_Oh for the love of…'_

Sasuke leveled a cool look their way, irises flashing red wheels.

"You're doing a poor job," he said at length, "hiding that Hyuuga from me."


	7. Ophidiophobia

**Ophidiophobia**

* * *

_:fear of snakes_

* * *

"Sasuke."

Kabuto – in a strategically suicidal move – came around the kitchen island and positioned himself between the two teenagers. The only ninja in the world qualified to make such a move was one who could regenerate vital organs. Which was truth. His back to Neji, the Hyuuga couldn't make out his expression, but the block gave him the precious split second out of Sasuke's gaze to activate his Byakugan. His winced as twin jolts of pain lanced through his head, his abused eyes protesting the sudden use of chakra. In the fore of his mind he could hear Kabuto negotiating with the younger Sound-nin, voice irate, colored by undertones of apprehension.

"You can't kill him until we know what his eyes are capable of. You of all people should realize the value of the Byakugan, the value of what he can do."

The doctor sounded too neutral to be truly at ease. The Byakugan revealed the minute tension in the sinew of his forearm and neck, stiffness in his frame previously absent in his bearing. He wasn't sure what Sasuke would do, or rather, he _knew_ what Sasuke would do, if he didn't act.

Sasuke raked wayward bangs from his face, eyes brilliant pin-points of chakra through the Byakugan. He sighed wearily. "Get out of my way, Kabuto."

"What will it prove, Sasuke?" Kabuto was barely murmuring now. "It's a waste."

"Move," he said blandly, attempting to pass Kabuto.

The medic glanced at the teen, now standing at his side, lidded eyes on his Hyuuga target. "Vendetta…is a poor excuse to kill someone, Sasuke-kun."

'_He can't stop him.'_ Neji's entire body felt cold, only his eyes and hands retaining any heat, products of his (pitifully limited) chakra._ 'Naruto, how could you possibly think, that he could ever come back?' _

"Aren't you even slightly curious?" Kabuto asked.

The dim floodlights over the kitchen island slanted light across Kabuto's glasses, eclipsing his eyes. Sasuke's face didn't reveal any sign he was listening, but he didn't move toward Neji again. The doctor lowered his voice to an inaudible murmur, tilting his head near Sasuke, as if confiding to him a close personal secret. The Leaf-nin watched every stir of dark hair Kabuto's breath set into motion as he spoke, every syllable formed with those lips, so close to Sasuke's ear but still bare to the Byakugan:

'He's capable of disarming the Sharingan, of undoing the most powerful doujutsu in existence, even if only for an instant. Don't you think that's remarkable enough to keep?' He smiled into the teenager's hair, pale strands of his own bangs mingling with black. Sasuke's gaze moved slightly, glancing toward the doctor, but he didn't seem perturbed. 'Besides…he's not worth killing.'

Sasuke made another one of those low, throaty sounds, a mere hiss of syllables from his mouth. His eyes dimmed to the safety of sable satin, providing a contemptuous glance for both of his companions in turn. Neji slowly deactivated his Byakugan, opening his pale eyes to watch the Uchiha's back as he moved away, watching the pale slope of skin between his shoulder and neck, where he could see the damned etching: the curse seal. For a stupid moment Neji found himself wondering if one of those deadly markings was preferable to the one on his forehead. If it was less humiliating to bear?

And suddenly Sasuke had his blade under his chin.

There's something terrible and intimate about a moment like that, where between two people one of them holds the life of the other in his or her hands, pooled like water, fragile, indefinite and warm. Neji didn't move, doesn't even breathe lest that mouthful of air be his last. Strange as it was, he couldn't bring himself to panic. He just met those bloody-red eyes – they'd gone brilliant crimson again in the excitement of his attack – head on. Sasuke looked utterly inhuman to him, scarlet irises set in impossibly pale frameworks of skin and bone, a fairytale spectrum of black, red, white that made Sasuke more fey than human. It seemed impossible that once upon a time this boy (this psychotic entity of anti-anger) had been best friend to Uzumaki Naruto.

"Sasuke!" Kabuto snarled. "If you kill him –!"

"You jump to so many conclusions," Sasuke interrupted the med-nin easily. "Did I _say_ I was going to kill him, Kabuto?"

Kabuto looked dubious. "Your word doesn't convince me as much since that _last_ incident…" He trailed away ominously.

Sasuke made a very slight concessionary frown. "That was…a hasty decision," he consented. (Neji was alarmed.) "But he's coming with me,"

"Orochimaru told me to –"

"Do I have to stab you again?"

No further argument was given. Neji was still alarmed.

**- - -**

Outside it was cold again. Sasuke's breath hung like dull cobwebs or an afterthought in the air as he walked and Neji tried to make out the message in them, whatever it might be. Between the two former allies the silence stagnated like old oxygen, a strange feeling not quite like anxiety rippling through the Hyuuga. He felt…like he wanted to _ask_ him something. But he didn't have any questions yet that wouldn't get him gutted. Something started buzzing in the back of his mind, like radio static in his skull, trying to tune into whatever frequency of insanity needed to make itself heard. Neji felt as though he could almost hear it, like he was just a twitch of the dial from hearing what FM Psychopath sounded like.

The Uchiha led him into a large antechamber, big enough to room hundreds and only dimly lit by torches. Towering stone columns supported the eventual ceiling overhead and a mammoth stone serpent was hewn into the wall at the far end of the floor. At roughly the middle of the room Sasuke stopped and stood there, unmoving as Neji halted behind him. The back of his dark head moved, turned slightly toward him.

"Activate the Byakugan." It was an order.

Neji didn't immediately obey (because fundamentally he was kind of obstinate like that); just tilted his head slightly instead. His eyes didn't read any killer intent in the other ninja, or any malice. Only vague annoyance at being disobeyed and Neji entertained briefly the possibility of sticking his tongue out at the Uchiha, just to gauge a reaction in those dead-man's eyes. He tried to imagine all the reasons the missing-nin could have for separating him from the medic – besides the obvious desire to kill him without interruption – and taking him off alone. Even as they stood there Neji could feel the chakra spinning through the other boy, hot and potent as sulfur behind his eyes.

"Activate it," he repeated.

The Hyuuga didn't react.

"_Activate_ it."

Having braved the waters, Neji closed his eyes and let his chakra well up to his head, warming his face slightly and washing through him. Thin lines traced their way up from his temples to his eyes, veins of chakra pumping into them until the second lens slid away and took the color of the world with it. Before him, Sasuke became a translucent shape shot through with glowing lines, humming inside the body like an electric current. From here, he could sense the slumbering power. His energies were dangerously focused, not overwhelming in amount like Naruto's or other chakra powerhouses, but sizable, enough to massacre, enough to be S-class…potentially.

Sasuke faced him. "That didn't do you any good last time."

He ignored him. He kept his eyes closed.

Then – rather more suddenly than he liked – Sasuke's fist shot past his left ear, missing only narrowly, taking Sasuke himself over his shoulder and carrying his well aimed knee into the air where Neji's nose would have been a split second before. Luckily, another Uchiha had taught him rather strongly how Sharingan users were fond of attacking randomly and he was ready. Neji twisted away, spinning back up, around and sliding into the lethal familiarity of his Juuken stance even as Sasuke landed out of range of the Hakke. Neji narrowed his eyes. Sasuke wasn't looking at him, just inspecting the ceiling in a thoughtful way a Nara might consider clouds.

"You reminded me of someone I've fought before," said Sasuke neutrally. "In the Land of Waves." He turned to face the Leaf-nin, face and body language dead in Neji's expert eyes. His gaze still smoldered though, a tic of emotion there if nowhere else. "He's dead now. Chidori cut his heart out."

"Why did you leave?" Neji asked, perfectly serious.

The other teen didn't react.

"Sakura and Naruto. They do nothing but train, nothing but grow stronger and I know they do it for you, more so than for themselves." Neji shook his head, loose bangs falling into his eyes. "Does that mean anything to you?"

No reaction.

"Did it ever?" Neji murmured.

Sasuke stepped into the Hakke-field and engaged him.

The rhythm of the next wave came faster than the last. Sasuke's attacks were coming at him so fast as to be simultaneous, lashing out from all sides and driving the Hyuuga to utilize the full breadth of his speed and flexibility to drive off the would-be killer blows. At these speeds, it was impossible not to consider Sasuke might be trying to kill him. That he might do it by accident if Neji didn't keep fighting, that maybe he was being toyed with and he didn't know it. In the dim gray of the empty room the two of them fought, their freak-show eyes picking each other out in the darkness, flashing white limbs in the gloom, pale hands that darted like starlings, the slap of flesh on the flesh as Neji's palm smacked his opponent's deadly blows away.

Juuken at its highest level, some say, looks like dancing rather than fighting.

Neji could feel himself giving into the pattern of this fight and the intensity of its level, his heart thrumming crazily like only a high-speed battle could trigger. Strange though it was, he couldn't help but feel as though he were home sparring with Lee again. There were nuances in style, surprises, fierceness of attack strength, of course – he was fighting _Uchiha Sasuke_ for crying out loud – but fighting Sasuke didn't feel like fighting for his life. Neji decided that was a bad way to feel while fighting a Leaf Village traitor, but his body was buzzing with that comfortable discomfort of being pushed hard by an opponent. Decidedly _not_ the racy panic of being pressed by a killer, which was only odd because Sasuke _was_ a killer. Neji ignored the politics and just fought.

He fought like only a Hyuuga could fight; with that loose liquid gentleness that looked passive until it hit. The '_crack'_ of palm to flesh and you felt the vibrato of pain through your bones. Neji feinted hard right, Sasuke anticipated him and met him on the left, snatching his arm and twisting it up. The Hyuuga slammed a fist home into a nerve cluster below the ribcage in Sasuke's right side, forcing the Uchiha to stop before he snapped the ligaments in Neji's wrist. He threw Neji to the ground, but he rolled, somersaulted to his feet and repositioned for Juuken. The missing-nin inspected him critically, Sharingan spinning.

"Your eyes are damaged." Sasuke made the observation like one might on weather.

"It was a last resort," Neji answered, startling himself.

Sasuke accepted this silently, then a flurry of blows bulleted at the Hyuuga's torso. Neji's palms caught and turned the hits until he gained room to recover, twisting into a desperate spinning kick. Neji licked a bead of sweat from his lip, missing his Kaiten acutely, missing chakra acutely. Sasuke rushed him suddenly, darting at him so fast Neji could do nothing but swear and raise his arms to take the blow like a sledgehammer, knocking him into a pillar and bouncing him off it like a thrown toy. Arms numb, he staggered back, bracing himself against the stone, blank eyes clenched more tightly shut against the pain.

"Who taught it to you?" Sasuke demanded.

"Hiashi," he lied instantly.

"Liar."

Neji thought it ironic only his enemies ever pegged him for a liar.

Then Sasuke blurred, zig-zagged, lunged, and Neji flinched.

The Uchiha's elbow crashed into his temple and Neji hit the floor, a short startled cry retched out of him as pain jolted white-hot through his brain, crackling through his skull in hyperactive synapses. The Byakugan kept blurring and jumping wildly as he shoved himself to his feet, spinning back to face his opponent. Bright copy-wheel eyes looked him up and down, by increments, and every increment seemed to trigger Sasuke's disgust.

"Why would he use _you_?" he asked softly, eyes bright red and dark.

"What makes you think," Neji said thickly, "I wasn't just lying about that?"

Sasuke didn't elaborate. His eyes drifted fractionally to the left through, back on some blood-soaked memory (one blood-soaked night) then back to him.

"Whatever message he told you to deliver," he said at last. "I have no interest in it."

"What makes you think," Neji said calmly, "it had anything to do with _you_?"

Sasuke dashed at him, lunged and slammed a vicious roundhouse into Neji's blocking forearm. The Hyuuga reversed his block, grabbing hold at the elbow, pivoting and hurling the other boy like a discus. Unfazed, the Uchiha managed an easy torque mid-air and hit the far wall feet-first, crouched there and looked bored. Red eyes flashed up, then he was gone, snapped out of perception and only Neji's ability to see everywhere at once tipped him off to the uppercut before it soared out of some pocket of neither-space three feet behind of him. Instinct is what slammed his free arm up and around, rammed the heel of his hand up and just nicked the corner of Sasuke's chin as he dodged it.

He didn't alter his style to match Sasuke's familiar lightening-fast brutality, but met it with illusionary slowness, functioning in Juuken's delicate state of fragility: evading blows through anticipation and momentum reversal that looked dangerously like dance. More often than Neji struck, he turned Sasuke's own force against him then counter-attacked with _vicious_ accuracy. In the back of his mind, Neji knew how this fight would end because he had no chakra and that was that. Without chakra, Juuken was just another fighting style and Neji knew he wasn't a stamina fighter. Lee's tactic to beating him was to hold out and avoid being hit long enough to wear the Hyuuga down. Without being able to disable him, Neji knew he'd tire before Sasuke.

True to his prediction, Sasuke caught him on a straight punch. Neji blocked, but the force of the blow stunned him and Sasuke yanked him into his arms and twisted him into a choke hold.

His put his mouth against Neji's ear, saying his words like a secret.

"I recognize that kind of chakra manipulation," he said. "I know that doujutsu. What did he say to you, Hyuuga?"

"I thought," Neji gritted out, "you weren't interested."

Sasuke jerked him painfully. "What did he say?"

"Nothing about you."

Neji rammed his thumb into a pressure point in Sasuke's inner arm, startling a hiss out of him as the limb spasmed. He pivoted and lashed his thumb and index finger at a pressure point – not a tenketsu, he had no chakra for that – but Sasuke was faster. Four blows across the Leaf-nin's torso and the last one slammed him into a rolling recovery, stopping and reversing and lunging back like a cat rebounding from the floor and he slammed the heel of his hand into Sasuke's face, blackening one bright red orb. He staggered; Neji lunged away, hands up again before he had time to think about what he'd just done and what he'd just risked by doing it. Sasuke spat and there was blood in the saliva.

Then there was a retching scream and it took Neji a moment to realize the scream was his and the pain ripping through every corner of his body had nothing to do with his Cage Seal and everything to do with the electrical current ripping through his skeleton. Sasuke had activated the Chidori Current. The surprise strike put Neji on the floor, stunned and sprawled as excess lightening crackled off his shoulders, burning the skin at his finger tips. Neji swallowed, getting to his knees as the last sparkles of lightening blitzed through his system, freezing his muscles and jolting nerves. His nose tingled, the smell of ozone in the air.

"Enough," Sasuke said coolly. He was inspecting the hand he'd just hit the Leaf-nin with, as if not sure it was his. "We'll stop for now."

The Uchiha was crouched a distance off, eyes briefly closed. When he opened them again they were black and Neji let his Byakugan recede.

"Orochimaru will be awake soon," the missing-nin said quietly. "Leave. Now."

The Hyuuga levered himself up, aching, battered, fatigued and hot with adrenaline still. He didn't move.

Sasuke's eyes flashed crimson again. "_Leave_."

Neji pushed his dripping hair from his face, not caring if his Cage Seal was bare. _'Nothing but his brother even phases him. Nothing else I said mattered.' _He turned to leave, feeling Naruto's loyalty was less admirable now so much as it was fanatical desperation. …and froze.

Chakra flooded his eyes, whiplash fast and drenched his world in monochrome colors, but not fast enough to react. Through instinct alone Neji braced himself, but the blow took him off his feet and slammed him to the floor, skull cracking back against the stone and bursting lights through his head. The lights meant his Byakugan had deactivated. Sad. Not even enough chakra to maintain his bloodline. A hand seized him expertly by the hair, fisting painfully against the back of his head and hauling him upright.

"I thought Kabuto was breaking you in a lab somewhere," murmured someone, voice sick and sweet.

The timbre was like that of a man but too soft, too delicate to be male. A contradiction in terms. It sent instinctive shivers down the jounin's arms, crawling down his spine and into his gut. Then his captor grabbed his arm and _threw_ him into the nearest stone pillar with enough force to blur the world into a terrifying smear. After that, he slammed into the granite and managed to not scream when his ribs cracked like porcelain inside him and he collapsed in a heap, unable to scream now that his ribs were broken and he could no longer _breathe_.

Nevertheless, Neji forced himself upright (dying on your knees was just not cool, after all) and braced himself against the cracked stone column, breathing shallow and fast to spare his ribs. Something had come into the room with them, something in the dark, exuding a stale and miasmic presence from the shadows near Sasuke's left. Like a reflex, Neji was all at once afraid. The darkness at Sasuke's left held something unspeakable, sick, unnatural grotesque darkness. There was a soft chuckle and something shifted and separated from the gloom. Hideous, slanting green eyes glittered with amusement, thin lips upturned in a frightening smile.

Neji froze up again, inside and out.

The man's face was a thin caricature of humanity; cheek bones hollowed in such a way they gave the impression of starvation without any of the weakness that accompanied such a human disability. His faded white robes draped a slender frame that did not suit a man of such hideous power and malice, a familiar rope-sash knotted at his waist, billowing sleeves dangling limply off thin shoulders to delicate white hands. Up close Neji could clearly see the man and the light casting him out of the darkness did nothing to alleviate his fear. Long blackish hair hung in long sheets down the Sennin's narrow shoulders, framing a thin, bloodless face.

Orochimaru regarded Neji coldly. "Nostalgic for Konoha imports, Sasuke?"

Neji was finding it _absurdly_ difficult to breathe.

"I'm finished with him," Sasuke replied, bored and annoyed.

"He managed to hit you," the Sennin observed, tilting his head like a curious animal. A faint smirk curved his mouth. "Interesting. Don't move just yet, Hyuuga. Introductions after all, I'm sure you have a _fascinating_ story to tell."

"If the Hyuuga continues to delay my training," Sasuke said coldly. "I'll crush his skull now."

Orochimaru blinked once then chuckled quietly. "That's incredibly mean, Sasuke."

Sasuke glared, pin-wheel red and black spinning –

Neji jerked right and dove sideways as Sasuke's kusunagi slammed into the stone where his throat had been with a resounding '_crack!_''

"I'm not kidding," he said, standing over the stunned Hyuuga.

Watching bits of stone crumbled from the edge of the weapon, Neji found it in himself to be impressed as well as very, very concerned about that naked steel and where it might be going next. With a masochistic fascination he wondered at the depth the edge had been driven in. The Uchiha wrenched the blade free and turned his attention to Neji. Those eyes met his with the force of a freight train, jerking him like a physical blow and freezing his tongue behind his teeth, his muscles in his skin. The Sharingan slammed through him and took his breath from his lungs, sparking a reactive adrenaline rush, weird urgency in him and '_Fuck, the _power_ there…'_ Then a pale hand settled on Sasuke's shoulder.

"You've made your point," Orochimaru soothed. "Quit scaring the poor thing. You'll frighten him to _death_."

"You're stalling," Sasuke said coldly.

Orochimaru smiled, venom colored eyes fixed on him and lifted his arm. Casual at you please, a great glistening black snake nosed out of the man's sleeve, coiling lazily over Sasuke's shoulders and directing its reptilian attentions toward the Hyuuga. Neji stiffened, gaze locked on the reptile as it flicked its tongue, tasting the tepid air, licking up the smell of sweat and weakness. Its master laughed a little, amused by the obvious affect his pet was wreaking.

"What do you think?" said the Sannin slyly. "Where should I place the curse seal?"

"He won't survive that." Sasuke's statement came across irritably.

Neji felt every nerve and tendon in his body seize up in a blind dread.

"He might," replied the man.

Sasuke turned away sharply, shoving the snake off his shoulder and walking swiftly away. "I'll be outside, Orochimaru." He didn't look back. "His left shoulder."

He vanished.

The snake struck.

The force of the blow knocked him back as inch-long fangs punched through the cloth and bandage to flesh, injecting hot venom into the still healing juncture at his torso and bicep. Neji screamed accordingly. The giant serpent pinioned him to the ground, thrashing and writhing as poison and heat pumped through his skin like cancer, infecting him in increments, taking over everything until Neji was clawing at the great, scaly head, half-sobbing, trying pointlessly to tear it off him, out of him. It bit again and again, driving the fangs in again, deeper, harder until he couldn't feel the puncture wounds through the venom.

Neji yelled until his voice broke, but the agony dragged on and on; like someone scraping a heavy bag through broken glass and him inside, suspended. The poison attacked the nervous system, sending the Hyuuga into violent paroxysms, jerking him around like an out of control marionette. He couldn't breathe. His didn't remember his broken ribs through his new, acidic pain, every inch of him eaten up in heat and blistering cold. Neji sucked a halting gasp as the fangs ripped free, dripping blackened blood and venom and left him limp on the ground.

'_Neurotransmitters,'_ he thought wildly as fire breathed underneath his skin. _'Electrolytes. Dendrites, ganglions, fuckithurts!'_

He was hyperventilating by then, arms twitching erratically as he tried and failed pathetically to lift them, move them, anything even resembling cognitive muscle control. He remembered the Chuunin Exam and watching Sasuke crawl to his feet, purple chakra leaking out his skin like steam and boiling off his body in fuming clouds. Had he done this – this, what he was doing now, screaming, passing out in increments and inches –? To do this at age twelve (or was he thirteen? Did it matter? Who cared? Did he?) seemed impossible. Horny beaked maggots were burrowing through his skin, digging into the webbing of nerves in his flesh.

'_I'mgonnadiegonnadiegonnadie.'_

A lightening bolt ripped through his head and he shrieked, spine arching off the floor, kicking and clawing indiscriminately and – _'ANBU never said anything about this!' _– tasting blood and metal. Bit his own tongue? Internal hemorrhage? Bloody nose? It felt like he was frying in his own chakra, his internal network little rivers of fire in his bones, bile boiling in his stomach, his eyes rolling up in his skull, everything _burning_. Then the electricity went out of him. Let his vertebrae liquefy, dropping him in a shivering heap back on the floor. He whimpered and curled in on himself, whole body a mess of maxed-out nerves clusters and crazy-mad phantom pains.

Orochimaru knelt beside him, took his chin between a pale thumb and forefinger and twitched his face up to look him properly in the eye.

"You'll learn to appreciate your Clan's kindness after tonight," Orochimaru said, the thinnest of smiles about his mouth. "Try to stay alive, Hyuuga."

Then he was gone and Neji was alone in his burning skin.

**- - -**

"_It doesn't count if you don't do it for real." _

_His legs ache from kneeling here so long, having dropped to his knees after the last blow fell and forgotten to move for hours afterward. He doesn't remember if he's said these words before – that it doesn't count – but his throat is choked up and dry like he's been repeating them for days. He can't taste the air here. He can't wrench his hands off the corpse. Who knows how long he's been sitting here with his head on her hollow chest, listening for a heart that's not beating because it's exploded in her ribcage. _

"_It doesn't count if you don't do it for real." He's breathing through his teeth. "It doesn't count…It's not real."_

"_I decide what's real, Neji. This is real."_

"_Itdoesn'tcount! You're lying!" he screams, burying his face against her shredded sweatshirt, the giant ugly one that Inuzuka boy bought her. It smells like dog and dead girl and he'd vomit if he had anything in his stomach to get rid of. He can't cry here. It's a physical impossibility. There's just the burning sting of trying to weep with none of the liquid relief. He folds his arms around her twisted neck and hides his face in her throat, sobbing against her broken collarbone and shaking for the fresh shock. "I'm dreaming. I'm dreaming. Genjutsu. Illusion."_

_He spun around. "GO AWAY!"_

_The empty Hyuuga courtyard is colored red and black like a photonegative in a slasher film. It may or may not have something to do with the some two hundred dead warped and twisted on the ground all around him, pristine white robes still spotless but for some dust and the occasional vomiting hemorrhage. Exploding arteries do that, leave corpses gargling blood afterward like she did. She's dribbled all over herself. The Chuunin Exams were a testament to his rookie skill – this time it took one blow and a split second. No defibrillation. Just the meaty pop as her arterial walls blew, muffled through bone and cartilage. _

_Neji clutches his head. "Stop it! Stop it, Itachi! It's not fooling me!"_

"_Did it feel good?"_

"_Stoppit!"_

"_You enjoyed it."_

"_You're wrong."_

"_How long have you wanted it?"_

"_Stop."_

"_You've planned it in your head. I didn't have to show you how."_

"_It doesn't count…"_

"_Poor Neji." _

_Hinata's bloodless hands twitch up and seize his wrists suddenly; twist them bloody palm up to show him and in Itachi's voice she says, "I used to tell myself the same thing."_

**Author's Note:**

_Bloody hell, this chapter was hard to write. However, I did receive some incredible and helpful reviews. For example, __**gray bugs **__brought it to my attention that I mistakenly referred to Sasuke's Chidori Current as an open circuit…which doesn't exist. Duh. All that anatomy and I forgot electricity 101. Thanks again, bugs. Also, gratitude shout outs to __**Beboots**__ for being so dedicated to her Neji obsession. __**Dayadhvam**__ for noticing my Kabuto fixation (I prayed someone would). And last but not least __**Lellian **__for kicking ass and taking names. If you lot still having dropped her a line, you're missing out. Thespian skillz that killz! _

_Next Chapter: fear of strangers._


	8. Xenophobia

**Xenophobia**

* * *

_: fear of strangers_

* * *

He woke up on a table next to another table, which a very dead man was occupying.

This might have been some cause for alarm, but as it was, he simply found it a good sign that he – unlike his roommate – was still breathing. The familiar figure of Kabuto was hunched over the corpse and cracking bones inside the bisected chest cavity with what looked like a giant pair of hedge clippers. Absorbed in his work, he didn't seem aware of the Hyuuga's return to consciousness and remained vigilant in his task. The pale flesh of the open belly jerked and jiggled with each moist 'crack!' of calcium, the raw inner flaps bouncing grossly. Neji cleared his throat a little.

"Ah," said Kabuto eagerly. He was wearing a pair of white latex gloves, but the blood was up to his elbows. "You're awake."

Neji forced down his inner wreckage and tried to concentrate on his outer wreckage instead. The mind-flaying agony, hours and hours frozen in pain, entire body aflame as forbidden jutsu and venom ripped through him. Already the detail were slipping away into repressed memories. Thank God for metal defensive mechanisms. In all honestly, if not for his previous built up immunity to pain (some sixteen years of domestic, legalized torture will toughen you up fast, kiddies) the shock would have killed him. It was disgusting to think he would have gone insane if he'd been unaccustomed to such pain and he had his sadistic grandmother to thank for his continued ability to think straight(ish).

Water came on and echoed in the bottom of a sink. Kabuto had pulled out of his patient's chest and tossed his gloves in a little trash can nearby. He started washing his hands, scrubbing with pinkish lather, pink with dye or blood, Neji couldn't tell.

The 'infirmary' was as cold like a meat locker...which was perhaps more fitting a name – shrouded forms lay out on the table tops swathed in neat cotton sheets, stained only occasionally by fresh crimson fluids. Neji didn't let his eyes linger, lest they tell him things he didn't want to know. Supported by four thick pillars near the corners of the roof, all the stone here had a soft orange cast to it and seemed malleable to basic earth jutsu. Raised stone platforms had been elevated on the left hand side of the room and thick slabs drawn out of the walls for what looked like dissections. He tried not to imagine what various atrocities might have occurred on the very surface was currently sitting on.

A sudden awful pain jagged through his shoulder, hot and fast and so deep Neji physically jolted back, gasping. Then it was gone, leaving nothing but heat and the memory behind. Wincing, he pulled his sleeve from his shoulder and let himself finally see what he'd known for hours and _hours_ yesterday would be there today. Where those inch-long fangs had punched through flesh and sinew, his skin gave no sign or scar. All that remained was a dark, vividly acid green hieroglyph on the plane just beneath his collarbone; it burned sluggishly under his touch and stayed hot against his fingers until he withdrew them. Kabuto was watching.

"That was too soon for a curse seal," the young physician said disapprovingly, as though Neji had failed to floss regularly since his last check up. "Luckily, it's a lower level curse seal, mostly temporary, needs to reapplied every few months or so. If he'd given you a real curse seal, like the Heaven Seal, you would have been dead within minutes." He toweled his hands quickly and smiled genially at the Hyuuga. "Now, let's have a look at you."

Neji said nothing, just slid off the table and put it between them.

The doctor laughed; a warm, happy sound in a morgue.

"I'm curious to know why your eyes in particular seem to be so…unique," said Kabuto from the other end of the room. "I'm certain I've never seen a doujutsu like that from a Byakugan user before. It's caught the interest of even Lord Orochimaru. Previously your being here was to be an experiment of my own, to keep Sasuke occupied while we work toward another goal, but now I'm quite preoccupied with you." He tiled his head, one hand at his hip. "Aren't you curious? They are _your_ eyes."

"I'm not," he said flatly.

Kabuto seemed absurdly _disappointed_ in him. He just sighed and turned back to the table behind him, and picked up a calligraphy brush. "That's the problem with you prodigies," Kabuto lamented, carefully painting the characters on a small sheet of paper. He seemed lost in thought for a moment. "You're given whatever you like and achieve whatever you like without ever understanding the means. You're all about the ends and see nothing else. It's a shame. I'd rather hoped you might wish to understand yourself a bit more than this."

The medical-nin tossed him something from his back pocket and Neji caught it without thinking about wanting to do any such thing.

"Eat that," he said cheerfully. "You're in for a rough night, Neji-kun. I had you on narcotics to dull those _horrendous_ night terrors the last couple days and the withdrawal period is going to be awful."

A pause

Neji broke the silence at random. "Why chocolate?"

Kabuto looked back at him, something like vague pride on his face. "Releases hormones in the brain to gets neurotransmitters moving faster. That clears out the last of the chakra left by genjutsu and other invasive techniques." He smiled warmly. "That and I mixed it with the same chemicals used in soldier pills." And Neji noticed something unpleasant in the otherwise pleasant curve of Kabuto's smile, hidden in the upper left-hand corner of his mouth.

He stared down at the tin-foiled wrapped rectangle. He looked toward his guide who no longer was looking at him and busied himself rinsing blood off his surgical instruments. Neji couldn't think of a time he'd ever been so utterly unable to read someone. He also couldn't think of a reason for his captor to poison him at this point so he crinkled the foil back and broke off a piece.

Neji was irritated to admit he _did_ feel better. Though, while most of him allowed the drug to take him under, the shinobi part of his brain was having a relative psychotic break – all his previous experiences as a hostage entailed torture, screaming, blood and kunai _diggingsodamndeephefeltlike_…not comfort food. He chewed the candy anyway, part of him only dimly waiting for Kabuto to whirl around and crow 'HA! Fooled you! It was full of _rat poison_!' but somehow Neji found himself less concerned about his digestive tract and more concerned about the mark on his shoulder.

"What…does this do?" Callused fingers brushed the mark gingerly. "It's not like…"

"Nothing like Sasuke's and not like the Cage Seal, don't worry. Orochimaru-sama is cleverer than that. You won't succumb to pain, you're not the type," Kabuto remarked, dumping his scalpels in a bin of sterilizer. "That curse seal means you're going to be cooperating with our objectives faster than I anticipated. Today actually. I need to introduce you to the other Jounin."

"You're serious."

The medic tossed him another bar. "You'll need it," he said warmly. "Should clear up some of those residual images. If you eat enough, maybe the nightmares won't drive you insane for the next couple days."

**- - -**

If you listened to the rumors – or rather, if you listened to Koketsu – Hyuuga Neji had been putting in a whole hell of a lot more hours than his payroll said he did. Most of this stemmed from the fact that again and again the young prodigy had become casual in the art of striding right through the lobby and straight into the Hokage's office without so much as a perfunctory 'I have an appointment'. Others would call that out and out galling bad manners, others would call it impatience because when you're running errands for someone who can literally crack your skull with a flick of her little finger, you don't really want to be late.

It wasn't that he needed the money – he didn't – or that he was trying to position himself for ANBU promotion – he wasn't – but rather something like a bit of field-crazy OCD setting in and if he had to 'go on one more chuunin-rank political crap-run I'll kill myself and someone else for spite!' He'd made the suggestion far more politely to the woman who could crack his skull in, but that was more or less the idea. The unfortunate side-affect was an inordinate amount of 'need-to-know' assignments that looked suspiciously like ANBU rank missions, hastily downgraded to suit a rookie jounin. (Often the threat of her little pinky was all that kept Neji from refusing them.)

The point was: Neji had more solo field experience than his files suggested.

The point was: Neji wasn't at all ill-prepared to handle these circumstances – odd and terrifyingly dangerous as they really were.

The point was: it did absolute nothing to stop Neji's utter and complete dumb-foundedness when Kabuto quite literally _introduced_ him to the new Sound Four.

They were all sitting in the den occupying themselves with breakfast – a display of utter normalcy so profound Neji had trouble processing – and didn't immediately register what they were looking at until four or five sentences into Kabuto's introduction. As it dawned on them, the atmospheric pressure in the room actually altered to accommodate all the _killing_ _intent _that flooded the air. Apparently – as far as the bastardized disunity in the Sound went – Kidomaru had been popular among his peers and it had leaked out somewhere that a rookie Hyuuga prodigy had been his down fall. Thus his success as a genin would probably be the death of him as a jounin. The irony burned.

The young woman sitting nearest the door ceased eating her bento and didn't move or look away from the tabletop before her (she seemed to have gone momentarily catatonic). A pale, white-haired androgenous looking fellow on the stool next to her looked up from the graphic novel he'd been perusing through and peered boredly at them over the spine of his book. The other two were sitting around the TV finishing off what looked like a dumpling between them while a satellite soap opera played fuzzily in the background.

The girl holding the pastry let it drop dumbly from the fingers at the sight of him, mouth hanging slightly. Her breakfast partner – a dark-skinned ninja with a heavy winter cap jammed down around his ears and dreadlocks sticking out under the edges – didn't look overly pleased with her and snapped a hand sharply against her forehead. She protested with a loud 'Ow!' and pouted.

"Stop drooling," he told her irritably, reaching for the dropped pastry and brushing it off with male indifference.

"Didn't have to hit me!" she whined, rubbing her forehead pitiably.

"Didn't have to drop breakfast," he retorted, cramming the rest of his meal in his mouth. "When you're done having sexual fantasies about the enemy can I bother you to get another dumpling or should I get up myself?"

"_Bastard_!"

"Whore!"

"Juri-chan, Ban-kun, you're embarrassing yourselves," Kabuto said disapprovingly.

The boy with the cap got up with a snort, and went to procure himself another pastry from the kitchen. His wiry frame stood Neji's height, slightly taller with a hang-dog look about him, suggesting he less than liked being up at this hour. The face beneath the wooly orange cap was olive-skinned and a little scarred, hollow cheeked like most ninja from hard daily workouts that lacked a proper diet to keep the skeletal look away. Healthy, but not nice looking exactly. He selected one of the doughy blobs on the plate behind the other male jounin.

"Did we just give up on this year's crop of Sound-chuunin and decide on jacking jounin from our neighbors? _Again_?" He pointed fiercely with his dumpling. "Lame, Kabuto. Lame."

The medic just smiled and left Neji standing at the door. Wildly he speculated making a break for it, realized that was excruciatingly stupid and didn't. "It would do you good to remember," Kabuto said conversationally, "that despite being the only home grown member of the Sound, born and raised here in the shadow of Orochimaru-sama, you're the weakest on the team, Ban-kun. Takon, Mai, and even little over-sexed Juri are stronger than you. And, _really_, there's always Sasuke-kun to consider." He straightened his glasses carelessly, watching the blood in Ban's face back away from his skin, low-burning rage in his eyes.

Neji noted the girl at the counter was staring rather openly at him. Unlike her out-of-uniform companions, she wore the familiar white robes and bow-tie obi of what Neji had come to identify as Sound elite. She had bandages wound up her arms to her elbows, green-streaked hair feathered neatly around high cheekbones and Neji recognized her wide blank-eyed stare because he'd seen it countless times in dark places and bright roads and muffled hallways. Twin blue irises smoldered with murder.

A Hyuuga had killed someone dear to her.

"You drag this one in?" murmured the man beside her, indicating Neji with a jerk of his delicate chin. His voice was a low tenor, belaying the loveliness in his face.

Kabuto smiled politely. "Good morning Takon-kun. And yes we did. He's recently…come over to our side as it were."

Neji allowed himself to glower openly.

Takon snapped his book shut and propped his elbows on the counter. "So…" He eyed Neji speculatively. "You killed Kidomaru...as a genin."

Neji nodded once.

"And you beat the shit out of our Golden-Boy?"

Neji didn't nod, just furrowed his brow uncertainly.

"The Uchiha," he clarified. "_You're_ the one that did all that damage last –"

"Yes," Kabuto cut in suddenly, sharply. He smiled a cold smile at the other jounin. "He's the one."

Takon sat back, thoughtful.

"I remember Kidomaru," Mai said suddenly, cutting into the dialogue. "He was strong. More importantly, he was brilliant." Her gaze hadn't wavered an inch from Neji's pale face, fixed on every detail of his Hyuuga features with manic hyper focus. She stood up abruptly and gazed about the room, bored. "I've got my mission. You lot can hang around and haze the new kid. Kabuto-_kun_, can I have a word?" Neji realized she was older than Kabuto only by the inflection she placed on the honorific. The medic himself didn't seem to take offence.

"If it's about that detail I mentioned before –" he said warningly.

"No," she replied, accompanying the physician out of the room. "I had a question regarding the genin teams –" The words faded into mumbles.

Neji glanced surreptitiously about the room, eyeing his trio of new companions and sizing them up best as he could without being overtly obvious about it. Takon yawned suddenly, lifting a hand as he did. Dressed rakishly in frayed green pants, flak-vest and wrist-length black turtleneck sweater, he was tall and slender-looking. Neji pegged him around five-six, one-hundred-thirty pounds and if first impressions meant anything – and they always did with a Hyuuga – he was strong as hell, but didn't have the same level of interest in him the other three seemed to have. Juri was sitting backwards in her chair, huddled against headrest, peering out at him, chewing mindlessly on her index finger. Ban was brooding moodily by the kitchen island, glowering intensely his direction.

"So," said Juri, breaking the silence. She grinned crookedly around the tip of her finger, wedge strategically between her teeth as she spoke, "how long are you here for?"

Takon snorted.

"Come off it, Juri-chan," Ban taunted. "If an Uchiha is too good for you, so's a Hyuuga. He's practically fucking nobility."

"Not here he's not," she told him without once breaking her eye contact. "God, look at his eyes. A hundred times better than that little girl Kabuto dragged up here before. She was a bore wasn't she, I wanted to gut that fat little bitch she was so annoying. I'm glad Kabuto traded her in."

Neji disguised an ugly emotional surge by tucking stray bangs behind his ear. "You spoke with Hinata-sama?" he asked, evenly as he could manage.

"Sama?" she echoed, tittering. Her teeth were clean and glistening white. "_Oooh_, is she your mistress?"

"Did you speak with her?" he repeated impatiently.

"Why? Do you love her? Was she your sweetheart? Did she kiss you after missions and…"

"She's my cousin," he interrupted her dryly.

"Dull," Juri sneered musically. "Yeah, I spoke to her. All she did was dither her name, rank and registration number."

'_Good girl,' _Neji thought fiercely.

"She was so useless Kabuto didn't even want her for breeding stock," she explained crassly, a spiteful little smile coloring her lips. "Not that any of our jounin would want to dick that ugly cow."

Ban and Takon exchanged meaningfully disagreeable looks that did nothing to improve Neji's mood or his opinion of the new Sound Four. Having lived most of his mature shinobi career measuring fights by the mile-long yard stick that was Kidomaru (his deadliest, most brilliantly malicious foe) he took it kind of personally that the man's replacements were so (pulling the aristocratic card here) _low_-_class_. He eyed Juri dispassionately. "Hinata-sama is a thousand times your better, Sound-nin." He shook his head unsympathetically. "You know that and so do I."

She didn't blush. She just stopped talking and her eyes went cold. Takon smirked. Ban laughed.

"Better stop while you're ahead, Juri,"

"Yeah, your inferiority-complex is showing."

Neji didn't say a thing.

"Mean one you are," the kunoichi mocked, scrunching her face and ignoring her teammates without exception. A delicate finger ran along the inside of her wrist, soft lips pulling in what wanted to be a smile, but kept shifting into something more perverse. "You know, you _are_ the prisoner here. Better be nicer to me."

Juri slid off her armchair and ruffled her chin-length blue hair with expert fluffing fingers (Neji recognized preening because his sparrows back home did that) then she straightened her cunningly tailored skirt and flounced toward the door.

"Well, well," she yawned easily. "I'll just go wait for you boys in the Third Atrium, shall I, Takon?"

"Yeah," the other Sound ninja said softly. "Now get lost."

Ban boosted himself onto the counter next to the other ninja. "Yeah, you get him after we get him. Like Four-Eyes always says: 'Procedure, procedure, procedure.'"

"That's '_Protocol_, protocol, protocol,' shit-head. Speaking of whom…" She was addressing Neji now. "Kabuto's going to break you in," Juri hissed, moving past the Hyuuga, close enough to touch, repelled by some polar element still in Neji's attitude. She lowered her voice. "I'll be waiting."

Then she was gone.

"Whore," Ban repeated with interest before turning to Takon and whispering.

They exchanged in low, murmured words with their mouths behind their hands, foiling any lip-reading Neji might have otherwise tried. They finished up and turned to the foreign shinobi with a great aura of intention. Neji braced himself, having already deduced that this was some kind of common-place procedure for Sound prisoner interrogation or something. It was clever and certainly original as far as mental ambush went, but these two didn't look like psychological giants. Neji was less worried about them, more worried about what Kabuto would do after they were done.

Ban hopped to his feet . "Shit. This'll take all damn day," he complained, reaching for Neji's arm.

"Ban…" Takon started warningly.

Too late. The Sound-nin made his grab.

Which, really, wasn't giving Neji much credit at all. Ban's fingers got about halfway wrapped around his arm before a powerful burst of chakra tore the first layer of skin off his finger tips. He yowled and snatched his hand back and he'd been bitten, flapping his hand urgently around his head. Neji shook his sleeve out and examined the cloth as if checking for stains (or exploding tags) and didn't look up at his slightly singed attacker. It was minor chakra heat-rash. Liking burning your fingers on an over-warm cocoa mug, but if he wanted to be dramatic Neji wasn't going to say anything.

"Dammit! His skin's, like, fuckin' electrified!"

Takon gave his fellow ninja a deprecating look. "That's because he's a Hyuuga, stupid. What did you expect?"

"Hey!_You_ wanna come over here and do this, fairy-boy?"

Takon turned his pale eyes one Neji, his gaze the color of liquid drain-cleaner, anti-freeze blue. "We can do this one of two ways, Hyuuga," said Takon, voice calm and even enough to tell Neji he'd done this kind of thing before. He was the voice of brutal reason in this tripod torture method that Neji's morbid experience was sketching out for him. "You're old enough to know what they are."

"The hard way and the much fucking harder way," snarled Ban sucking on his wounded fingers.

Neji quirked an internal eyebrow. The voice of brutal lack-of-reason, obviously, these guys worked as a team because they could not do what Kabuto did. Kabuto could play good-cop, bad-cop in a room by himself. He gave the two ninja a not-so-apologetic shrug of the shoulders and his chakra reabsorbed easily to its natural flow in his veins. Takon nodded and the other ninja glowered and unwound some assassin's wire from his belt. In Neji's eyes Ban's arms seemed to vibrate, chakra molding around his thumb and index finger as he wove a cat's cradle between his fingers. The copper sang with chakra.

"Hold out your hands," Takon ordered him quietly. "And nothing funny. Kabuto's still got you on chakra suppressants. So even if you can manage a little Juuken, trust me when I say you'll need all of it to beat just one of us. Much less two."

Neji held out his hands and waited.

Ben looped the wire around his wrists and forearms like a child playing string-games, garroting wire brushing bare skin gingerly as he worked. Then he pulled them tight until the Hyuuga's arms were bound side by side, the angle forcing him to pull his arms to his chest to be comfortable. There was a lot of chakra in the bindings. The second the wires touched his skin Neji felt the metal leech his chakra. Being highly sensitive to what went on in his body the drainage was maddening, but he fought to appear as though he didn't feel it; most ninja wouldn't. The metal ions in the wire's structure seemed to have become magnetized to chakra and were literally pulling his energy into them, binding the power in his arms, stopping the flow. He hated to admit it, but he was kind of impressed.

"You guys do this often?" Neji inquired, professionally curious.

"Often enough to be annoying," replied Takon amiably, grabbing the Hyuuga's shoulder and spinning him toward the door. "Kabuto's pet projects always go through us once or twice before he takes them to pieces."

"In a few weeks, chum, that'll be you," Ban looked pleased at the thought. "Juri always gets lubed up over the soon-to-be-dead pretty boys."

"Get some couth," Takon told his comrade, disinterested.

Ban just sniggered. "I'm just saying. If we've got a Hyuuga, Yakushi's gonna make the most of him. That's all I'm saying."

"Shut up."

"C'mon," Ban complained. "Stop being such a damn prude. We both know what _you'd_ do given the chance to – _Ah!_ Fuck!"

_Crack!_

"Language," Takon said softly, lethally, having slammed Ban's head against the nearest wall. He'd moved so fast by the time Neji spun around it was over in a split-second of blurred brutality. Takon had a firm grip on his comrade's arm, having twisted up between his shoulder blades in what Neji knew to be an excruciating position. The pinned shinobi grimaced and said something through the corner of his mouth that Takon smacked his forehead into the stone for. "Either shut up or I'm going to rip your tongue out of your skull and nail it to your forehead. Understand?" A pause. "_Understand_?"

"Yeah," Ban muttered. "Get off me."

Having said his piece Takon let him go and stepped back. "Go. I'll take this one alone."

Ban muttered and stormed down the hall, leaving Neji and Takon behind in the dark.

Neji bit the inside of his cheek, senses humming on high alert, acutely aware of being alone with the other Sound-nin. The hallway suddenly seemed exponentially longer and darker than it had before. Very horror-show flick. This was a stupid line of thought, so Neji broke it off and made a show of tucking his hair behind his ear. He was annoyed to find his hands shook a little. He couldn't tell if it was fear, adrenaline or drugs. Damn.

After a while Takon leaned forward and murmured, "We're not going to torture you, Leaf-nin."

"Well that's rather generous of you," he said passionlessly.

He ignored the jibe. "Turn around, Hyuuga."

When Neji didn't immediately move the Sound-nin caught his arm gruffly and spun him around, grabbing his shoulder near the base of his neck. A thumb was shoved into the groove between his third and forth cerival verebra – '_Keichu Point. It'll take out the greater par t of my occipital lobe before killing me.'_ – just above his blind spot. There was no telling if his proximity to the first thoratic verebra was a fluke or a threat. Neji didn't say anything and assumed 'fluke'. Takon walked him down the halls with the nonchalance of someone who knew exactly what he was doing and had done it enough to be dead confident in its execution. The hum of chakra through his system felt like a pulse to Neji and he had a strong one, a very strong one.

"Do you know who I am?" Takon inquired.

Neji mentally struggled with his urge to say something really, _really_ sarcastic (and potentially detrimental to his health) and settled for, "Sorry, no."

"I guess the family resemblance isn't as powerful," Takon sighed to himself, not really forlorn. "Sakon and Ukon were twins after all. I'm just their older brother."

Neji kicked himself. There was a mother and father rolling in their unimaginative graves, having given their three sons ridiculously similar names for this very reason. Takon, Sakon and Ukon, the Sound trouble trio or something. Nicknames would abound if only Kiba and Kankurou hadn't diced two-third of the equation to meaty, bloody bits. Neji contemplated making a mention of the fact that he hadn't had anything to do with killing the twins. He was only remotely involved. In fact, he should have more of a beef with the Inuzuka Clan than with his. He glanced over his shoulder at the vaguely androgynous ninja behind him, studying him critically, hyper aware that all the Sound elite had a reason to skin him alive and shrieking.

"Oh…I suppose you do look like them. Older though. You're…what in your twenties?"

"Twenty-two. I am – was six years older. I guess I didn't train them hard enough." He shrugged a little, as if this were merely disappointing, not necessarily an emotional and psychologically scarring blow to a blood brother. "It was a mistake letting them join the Sound Four. I should have tried harder to convince them guard duty wasn't their place. Now look: death by genin."

Neji thought about that. "The Sound Four…were just bodyguards?"

"More or less. Elite, young. Very easily persuaded. I was too old for the snake's selective tastes."

"Because you're set in your ways?"

"No, just too old, I think. I've noticed nothing but jail-bait gets into his good graces."

Neji fought in internal gag-reflex. "Oh…well, it's the young that fight the wars, they say. You're a member of the Sound Four now?"

"Orochimaru-bastard-sama needs _someone_ to play ANBU for him. Besides you can't get much closer than Sound-Four and that's truth, but be a sweetheart and don't tell anyone I said so." He jerked Neji back suddenly pinning the smaller Leaf-ninja against his chest. "That's a secret," he whispered raspily into Neji's ear, seriously invading the young jounin's idea of personal space boundaries. Neji juggled his suspicions about this: either Takon was putting it on to scare him or he really was just that creepy. Given the Sound-country track record with creepy jounin, Neji was more inclined to believe the later.

"Naturally," Neji managed as casually as possible.

He waited tensely for Takon to let go. When he didn't the Leaf-nin cleared his throat and drummed his fingers together.

"We'll just stay here then?" Neji inquired.

Takon pulled a kunai from a hip holster. "How old are you?"

'_To lie or not to lie?'_ Neji thought rapidly.

"Eighteen."

Takon thought about that…then sliced the wire off his arms. He resumed his death-hold on Neji's neck and they started walking again, the Leaf-nin morbidly wondering what might have happened if he'd told the truth and grimacing to himself. Some parts of the shinobi trade were better left unsaid. He hoped to God that part of his ANBU training would never tested in the field; it was traumatic enough taking that course from scary and psychologically savvy Ibiki, who knew _exactly_ how to make you squirm.

Takon jerked him to the left. "In here," he directed gruffly.

Given little choice in the matter Neji found himself physically man-handled through a very large and unyielding door (which Takon slammed him into a couple times before Neji managed to jar it open with his shoulder) and into what looked like a cafeteria. Ignoring the new found ache in his bruised shoulders, it looked like Takon had been perfectly honest about not torturing him. This was hardly the place for it if someone was going to rip vital Konoha intelligence out of his still screaming mouth. In fact, he was about to say something of that nature to his captor when there was a great thundering of feet.

Suddenly they were swamped by an ocean of screaming activity.

Neji jerked, startled as hundreds of children poured without warning into the room and swarmed the buffet – the sound of feet running, shrill voices babbling into a cacophonous disharmony of noise, the thunder of bowls and disposable chopsticks, shrieking whistles and the familiar sticky smell of PB&J inherent in grade-school children across the world. Neji stared in open-mouthed shock.

Takon glanced at him. "What's wrong, Hyuuga? Don't like kids?"

One of them skidded to a stop and backtracked to grab Takon by the sleeve.

"Who's that?" growled the small pink-haired girl, jabbing a tan little finger at the Leaf shinobi.

Takon glanced down at her. "This is one of our new jounin," he said with a kind of kind easy familiarity that made Neji vaguely ill. "His name is Neji-san. He may be your teacher soon enough, so you'd best be nice to him. Alright, Minami-chan?"

Neji's spine went ram-rod straight and true, jolting the young jounin painfully upright all at once and he stared down at the little girl in abject horror.

The girl made a face. "A teacher, Takon-sempai? He's not _old_. Aren't teachers supposed to be _old_?"

Another pink-haired girl stopped by her side, peered at him and blushed. She whistled haltingly at the other girl who howled with laughter and whistled back, clicking and popping her tongue in unmistakable phonetic code. Then they were gone, winging off into the mob like fish into the sea.

Takon watched them go with a dead disinterest that Neji presumed he wore while killing kittens or something. "Those two are really coming along. The others can't even get the simple base words and Nishi-chan is already trying to flirt. Tch…she'll be more trouble than her sister." The Sound-nin deigned to note the younger ninja's blank irritation because he sympathetically added. "It's field-code. You can whistle can't you?"

"What is this?" Neji gritted.

"Most of these children are newly minted genin," Takon said easily, maneuvering around the perimeter of the chaos with practiced ease, dodging randomly flying students as they hurled themselves off chairs and things. One little girl, barely six, lunged off the nearest table into Neji's arms, squealing "Catch me! Catch me!" in a flailing ball of energy and legs. Neji caught her brusquely and set her down to run, shrieking happily, away. Takon didn't seem to notice. "We're currently in the process of issuing jounin-mentors, Hyuuga. We're compiling teams even now."

"You want me to lead a team?" Neji demanded.

Takon was leading him out of the dining hall now and down another long hall, the pale Sound-nin not once glancing back at his irate captive. The quiet grew more and more lengthy, the yelling chaos of prepubescent assassins fading into the distance.

"You can't be serious," he snapped at last (the tension had been too much). "You're insane if you expect me–,"

"—to be responsible for three of our genin?" interjected Takon dryly. He'd stopped at a closed side door, producing a key for the lock. "No. They're quite serious." He unlocked the door. "Kabuto may be a twisted freak but he's not a kidder. He wasn't joking when he told you we plan to make you a member of the Sound, sweetheart. Get used to it."

"You are mad," Neji enunciated.

Takon pushed the door open and walked inside. The room looked like a mistreated hotel room, single cot, desk, oil-lamp and an adjoining bathroom. It hadn't been lived in for ages if ever and Neji couldn't be entirely sure why they were visiting a bedroom. Neji's guide ignored the Leaf-nin's puzzled (vaguely suspicious) expression and crossed the room to the desk on the opposite wall, and picked up a pile of stacked manila folders.

"This is your room," Takon said dispassionately. "It'll be locked at night. During the day you'll have an escort of some fashion or missions to occupy your time. Don't try to bust out, or anything else foolish. You're branch family Hyuuga. You know what curse seals can do."

He recrossed the room with the files in hand and Neji recognized the paperwork for what they were: genin dossiers. The Sound jounin shoved the stack at the Hyuuga, as if he would absorb them by proximity alone. Failing to do so, Neji just blinked at them, not moving toward them lest it be taken as some kind of commitment to the task. Takon seemed more or less neutral about this and just stood there with his arms held out, waiting.

"Those are our newest genin profiles," Takon told him. "Read up. Three of them will be your students."

"How do you know I won't kill them all and escape?" Neji said bluntly, too impatient to banter half-truths or strategy.

Takon arched a snowy brow, tilting his head just enough to peer at Neji through his bangs. "Would you kill innocent genin for the sake of your freedom?" There was a stagnant beat of rest in which those calculating – frightfully curious – blue eyes seemed to draw every corner of the room into them.

Neji's skin prickled. Finally, Takon pushed the files into his arms.

"We've already selected a mission for you," he said shortly, turning on his heel and striding to the door. "We don't waste time with D-Class missions here in Otogakure so be prepared. You'll meet your team after Kabuto's given you a crash-course in Sound Village protocol…which will hurt, by the way."

"You're all nuts," Neji reminded his captor loudly.

"We follow Orochimaru." He said this like it was an explanation – which, really, it was – and gave him one last look in the dark. "Of course we're nuts."

He closed the door and left Neji to the silence.

_**Author's Note:**_

_What the hell am I doing?__Special thanks to __**Dayadhvam**__ for editing my craptastic Japanese. You'd never know I took two years of it. But bah! And 'no'. No one told Itachi to do anything, he was just bug-fucked all on his own but there's a the piece of crazy in everyone. Just depends how big it gets to grow. Thanks to __**Beboots**__ for being awesome and supportive as usual. I confess this fic is pretty much gratuitous Neji torture, as all my Naruto fics have been. Ahhh…not to be a sadist. What a world that must be. Hope you enjoyed the new Sound Four. May they live up to their names. More on the way. I promise, just slowing down for the sake of my real life. Stupid school…_


	9. Pedophobia

**Pedophobia**

* * *

_: fear of children_

* * *

'_They look like Haruno.'_

It was Neji's first thought; striking him with such disgusting simplicity he realized the resemblance was probably no accident. Kabuto was looking pleased with himself, a very slight tic of the mouth he only allowed himself when he wasn't bothering to hide anything from you. Neji had gotten used to seeing it by now.

"Shinobi," the doctor addressed them together.

They glanced nervously at one another and the rookie jounin felt himself sharing in their mixed apprehension. Butterflies was not quite a fitting metaphor, stampeding fire-ants seemed more accurate, but either way he couldn't let an iota of that onto his face The children blinked querulously at him, each noting their own detail of him: The boy's eyes bounced all over to the network of bruises and bandages spanning visible skin. The loud girl with pink hair was staring unabashedly at his seemingly blind eyes. The quiet girl was peeking at his forehead protector – her eyes told him she could tell it was brand new.

"This is Hyuuga Neji," said Kabuto conversationally. "He'll be your jounin mentor for the duration of your time as genin. That's all. Your first mission begins now." He handed Neji the mission scroll and as he passed him, clapped him on the shoulder – ignoring how it send an obvious ramrod jolt through the Hyuuga's body – and murmured, "Forty-eight hours, Neji-kun. Don't try anything foolish."

Then he was gone.

And three pairs of eyes ogled.

The three of them looked painfully small and skinny in the crisp six AM air. The canopy seemed to be miles up, the forest floor an open expanse of mossy carpet, deepening into tangled dark green undergrowth. This was the first of the outside world he'd seen in – _hell_ – a long time and he hated that he was seeing it now under such circumstances as to be maddening. Most people would snap, any reasonable person would go utterly bug-whacked insane, but Neji prided himself on being resilient against what broke the minds of most and he'd be damned before a bunch of prepubescent little kids were the cause of his mental collapse.

There was a pause…then:

"_Whaaaaat_?! You're _our_ sensei? _You_?"

"Oh dear."

"_Who_ the hell is this guy?"

Neji had a migraine this morning. Also, he'd woken up with his Byakugan active and another line of nightmare script in his mouth, enough to make him suspect that Kabuto might not have been _completely_ talking bullshit about his audible night terrors. Worse, he'd come to realize that his eyes weren't the only portion of him suffering some kind of damage in the wake of…everything…which in itself was an irritation when one is emotionally wrung one, physically exhausted, and mentally expended. That be might be splintering into mad little crazy bits as well was too much to bear.

He didn't need another line to his laundry list of God-awful problems.

"You are _not_ a jounin!" declared the first little girl, flinging a partially gloved finger dramatically at him. Her bright green eyes glittered cat-like and keen. Half buried in the vibrant explosion of her bubblegum dreadlocks, the quarter-note of the Sound glittered from the hitae-ate. "You're too young! I've seen chuunin ages older than you are and you're too…" she floundered for a word vile enough, "_girly_!"

Neji restrained the urge to hurt her.

"Yeah!" bawled the only male member of the team. "You don't look old enough to be a proper _chuunin_, much less our teacher!" He was only slightly less scrawny than the girls beside him and, by wearing an enormous flak jacket, made himself look far smaller. Like most boys his age, he'd taken inordinate amounts of hair-gel to his head and achieved a level of anti-gravity that put even Sasuke's perpetual bed-head to shame. It didn't help that its color was 'shoot me now' orange, either. Eager for a fight he roared, "Kabuto-sempai is _crazy_ if he thinks we're gonna listen to _you_! You're, like, only a couple years older than us!"

Apparently they spoke solely in exclamation marks.

They reminded him powerfully of Naruto.

Neji grimaced, rubbing one ear.

"Actually," he said tersely, "I'm a couple years older than a couple years older than you. And if you'd kindly stop screaming at the top of your lungs and I'd tell you that the Sound Five weren't much older than I am now." Neji tugged a string from where he'd tucked it in his belt, pulling his hair from his face and tying it back while he spoke. "In the Leaf Village, genin are rarely under the age of twelve and in the Stone they're typically over fourteen. All three of you are young by _my_ standards."

He looked to the other pink-haired girl stepped shyly out from behind her sister (because they _were_ sisters, Neji was gene-saavy enough to recognize that). Her long hair was rosy, but fell in soft folds down the sides of her head rather than coiling and exploding like her counterpart. She peered shyly up at the young Hyuuga. "It's nice to meet you, Neji-sensei." Then she whistled something at him, clicking her tongue between notes, then promptly blushed.

The other girl sneered loudly. "You said it wrong! You said it wrong!" She immediately whistled and clicked right back. "That's how you say it, Nishi-baka-chan!"

And then they both trailed off into a conversation of notes, harmonies and clicking. If body language meant anything, Nishi was still being teased mercilessly. The girl blushed harder but it was very obvious she'd just tried to throw him off with Sound field-code. Not that it mattered. Kabuto had managed to drill basics into him well enough that he'd understood the gist of what passed between the sisters, both of whom – apparently – were fluent in it. Also, he suspected Nishi had just made some kind of observation on his eyes…he didn't know the adjective pattern she'd used though.

His eyebrows lifted minutely. "Are you three going to make introductions or would you rather I just called you by numbers?"

The loud girl made a face. "Introductions? What? Like the name game or some crap? _Psssh_!You're not serious are you?"

He glared at her. "You're Three."

She sputtered. "Why 'three'?"

"Because I don't _like_ you."

"What!" She puffed her narrow chest inside her flak jacket, bony cheeks puffing indignantly. "My name is Hebita Minami. I'm the strongest genin in the Sound and if anyone says otherwise I'll beat the _crap_ out of them!" Here she glared around the group before looking back to Neji. "I don't like pickled anything and I don't. Like. _You_."

Neji nodded. "Thank you." He glanced expectantly to Nishi.

Minami's sister swallowed and stepped forward, knock-kneed and nervous. "I'm Hebita Nishi," she announced, as if she weren't entirely sure about that. "I'm Minami's twin sister…and I…I'm good at…stuff." She'd started blushing insanely by now, face lit up bright red. She kept fidgeting with the hem of her skirt and making distressed little clicking sounds, devolving into Sound field-code in her terror. "I don't like frosting and umm…I like…kittens?" She looked like she'd have a panic-attack any minute. Neji nodded gently, fearing for her nerves.

"My name is Aori Tachi," declared the boy aggressively. He was only just slightly taller than the girls by virtual of his spiked orange hair alone. Stepping forward, he glared hot sulfur-colored needles (Neji noted the iris mutation with third-party interest) at Minami. She glared back and made a fist-pounding gesture that alluded to previous rivalries between the two. "I'm one of the last members of my clan and Orochimaru-sama hand picked me, so I know I'm smarter than _you_!" (Speaking to Minami.) "I like strawberry ice-cream and I don't like _pink_!" Then he glanced apologetically at Nishi.

"Miniami-san. Nishi-san. Tachi-san." Neji tossed them the mission scroll and Minami snatched it deftly, scowling. "It seems our mission is one of utmost importance."

Neji was determined not to show the discord in his head. Despite the bone-grinding ache drilling through his temples and the feeling that a Sound Village B-rank wasn't anything like a Konoha B-rank, he managed to keep his voice even. His trio of would-be shinobi kept their quiet, albeit, reluctantly. Minami and Tachi looked ready to kick him in the shin and go find themselves some ice-cream, but Nishi, at least, was listening with rapt attention.

"There's a contingent of Cloud chuunin scouts who've recently overrun a small Sound base in the north. As far as we know, no reinforcements have been sent. It's presumed to be a stagnant operation." He let the scroll roll open from his hands, hanging in the air before the young ninja to read. "Our job is to get them out and dispose of the facility's contents."

"Chuunin, huh?" said Tachi doubtfully, glancing up at him. He scowled, jamming his hands into his pockets and looking defiant. "You sure you can handle it, Hyuuga-sensei? Most chuunin I know are older than _you_ are. How do we know you're any good?"

Neji just stared at him, eyes white-out blank and unblinking until the little boy shrank under his stare and, properly cowed, didn't say anything else. "We have forty-eight hours to reach the base and one to get back," he said at last, tonelessly. "_No_ exceptions. If we aren't back within hailing distance by this time Tuesday, we don't come back. We don't have time to argue about how qualified you think I am to take care of you. From what I've heard, the three of you should be able to handle yourselves."

Nishi raised her hand hesitantly, but Minami slapped it down and she recoiled with a whimper. Neji waited patiently while she regrouped. "I…I've never heard about such a time constraint on a first mission. Why…why did we get one?"

"You can take that up with someone after we get back, not now," he told her shortly. "Let's go."

He set off at a reasonably quick pace and like a pack of ill-fated puppies they fell in behind him. The out-of-sync clunking of their little sandals faded into perfect silence after a couple hundred meters, and soon the only sound was the occasional mumble betwixt Nishi and Minami, or the clack of the free-hanging kunai about Tachi's belt. Keeping his back to the three genin, he activated the Byakugan – with only the slightest of pains this time – and peered far into the north, pinpointing the coordinates on the missions scroll.

"We should reach the base around noon," he said matter-of-factly and behind him the trio startled unanimously. He kept running, looking imperiously ahead. "The front entrance is south-facing with a single back entrance and no windows. Familiarize yourself with the blue-print given there. From what I can see there are as many as five live bodies inside the labs and three scouts patrolling the perimeter. We'll be eliminating them silently. Then moving on the base itself."

"You can _see_ that," Tachi ogled.

"Hyuuga, _duh_!" Minami leered.

"Less talking. More reading," Neji rejoined shortly.

The Sound students exchanged dubious looks, but studied the scroll between them obediently enough. The trees flashed by in quick blinks as they raced through the forest, Neji reaching up a hand out of their sight and laying it over the dark mark just below his collarbone. The skin was warm, almost hot to the touch. He closed his eyes, still feeling the process that put that heat there and knowing what the heat _was_ burned deeper than flesh into his body and he shuddered slightly.

By virtue of Hyuuga linage, Neji was more than a decent expert in curse seals. This one, not unlike his own fluency with chakra manipulation, was a stimulation mark: allowing the user limited control over chakra movement within the body. Used correctly, it could do anything from paralyze him to put him to sleep. It could put him on the floor screaming in illusionary pain then dope him on his own endorphins. It could induce hallucinations and hysteria. It could trigger an orgasm. (Neji randomly decided he would have preferred another pain inducer. At least those were nice and straight forward.) Having oodles of prior and intimate experience with curse seals, Neji knew exactly what to expect and how to deal with it. He was trained for that.

Children – however – in any shape or form were _not_ particularly a subject with which he had oodles of prior experience or ability with. Reading into and understanding the motivations of an adult shinobi who may or may not be about to put a kunai through your skull was not the same as figuring out why the hell your ten-year-old killer-to-be has smeared peanut butter on his or her face before a mission. (No joke. Saratobi Konohamaru was notorious for this back home.)

Furthermore, what kind of deranged psychopath decides to go through inordinate amounts of trouble and risk to procure themselves a rare clan prodigy, drag him to you secret lair and torture him briefly, just so you can give him chocolate and promote him to jounin mentor? None of this was adding up in any way what so ever and for some subtle reason Neji was getting the impression that was exactly what his captors wanted. This strange forced familiarity felt like a psychological attack, but Neji couldn't see the point in it. Was it chaos theory persuasion: completely random decisions to throw him off balance? Overwhelm him with forced responsibilities in order to integrate him into the Sound?

'_Or it's just a distraction…and I'm missing the real assault completely.'_

Which, given the circumstances, seemed perfectly reasonable.

- - -

**Ninja Information**

Name: Hebita, Nishi  
Registration ID: 000235  
Hidden Village: Sound  
Rank: Genin  
Team: -

Element: Water

**Physical Information**

Age: 12  
Sex: Female  
Birthday: 6/21  
Bloodtype: A  
Height: 148.2 cm  
Weight: 33.9 kg

**Notable features** _Has achieved top fluency in Sound field-code. While lacking intensely in offensive taijutsu she exhibits understanding of defense and evasion skills. Student possesses high-chuunin level genjutsu abilities and a select few jounin-level ninjutsu techniques while working in tandem with her twin sister in combat. (refer to file ID#: 000244; attached data sheet) Has achieved high skills in genjutsu techniques and illusionary strategy in battle situations and been commended for level-headedness during high-intensity training missions and high effectiveness in target elimination. (Note: marked for assassination and reconnaissance training.) _

_Lacks in basic offensive taijutsu. Student's clarity during battle is nearly outweighed by intense emotional vulnerability out of battle situations. Student often bursts into tears when asked to do any act of public display (failed several Henge tests because they were done before her peers). Lacks physical strength and stamina._

- - -

Nishi bounded up on his left, blinking up at him. "Neji-sensei," she peeped politely. Neji notied immediately that she twiddled her thumbs in that horrifically Hinata-like fashion. He fought back a reflexive grimace. "Neji-sensei, Kabuto-kun said your family name is Hyuuga. Of the Konoha Hyuuga?"

He glanced at her, face neutral. "Yes?"

"So you…you've defected from Konoha?" she inquired hesitantly.

"One would assume so," said Neji dryly.

She frowned suspiciously, surprising him a little when she rebutted, "Are you head family then? Only head family can possibly defect. Branch family are killed if they try."

"You know Hyuuga clan divisions?" he inquired, mildly surprised.

"Well, yes. Kabuto-kun teaches a course on blood-line limits and inter-village relations. We have basic training in _all_ known blood-lines."

"Really?" Neji said, but thought, _'Busiest spy I've ever heard of.' _Jealousy was hard to combat.

"So are you head family?" She was eyeing his forehead protector, probably less sneakily than she meant, but he didn't call her on it.

'_I'll have to watch this one,' _Neji decided. "I'm only half-Hyuuga, actually. Have you memorized the layout of the base, Nishi-san?"

"Oh, yes," she said, blinking. "Minami and Tachi-kun are…um…almost finished."

"Are they?"

"…yes."

Neji could see without looking that they were, in fact, making faces at each other and had been doing so for the better part of ten minutes. He glanced surreptitiously at Nishi, who turned a distinctive shade of red and muttered something before falling back to join her teammates. She implored their attentions and got them to grudgingly look at the scroll again, glaring spitefully at his back from time to time. It bothered Neji only a little that their lives were more or less hanging in the balance and they were happy to make silly faces at one anther in lieu of focusing on their mission.

Also, these brats could very well be the reason he died… _horribly_.

'_That and Kabuto's ditching the usual methods for me and mine' _thought Neji tiredly. If the aghast look on Nishi's face was any indication, this was not the usual way of things in accordance to her studies. He suspected strongly the other genin teams would be taking a day to talk things over and brief for their assignments. Neji's team wasn't given that lenience. _'He doesn't want me to have any time to think at all. While the other teams are organizing themselves, we have to rush it and wing it. He's trying to run me into the ground.'_

Part of him had to confess…he was very close to succeeding.

- - -

**Ninja Information**

Name: Aori, Tachi  
Registration ID: 000239  
Hidden Village: Sound  
Rank: Genin  
Team: -

Element: Fire

**Physical Information**

Age: 11  
Sex: Male  
Birthday: 7/11  
Bloodtype: O  
Height: 149.3 cm  
Weight: 35.9 kg

**Notable features** _Member of the Aori Clan, former Lightening Country bloodline. Student displays notable proficiency in persuasion and use of hypnosis techniques during combat and infiltration training sessions. Specializes in long range throwing weaponry in conjunction with doujutsu and cloaking techniques and has mastered an array of chuunin-level ninjutsu techniques such as Katon, Shadow Clone, and Hidden Mist camouflage jutsu. Works well with other genin, but displays signs of over-competitiveness with certain peers (refer to file ID #: 000244) and is inclined to lead rather than follow. Has achieved mastery over use of the Kingan. _

_Is prone to showboating rather than stealth and possesses extreme over-confidence as a result of long time use of his doujutsu to get his way (often resorts to hypnosis when frustrated by peers). Sometimes temperamental and moody toward peers and superiors alike. _

- - -

"Sooooo."

Neji looked away from the trees, deactivating his Byakugan as he did. They'd stopped for a few minutes to let Minami 'Take a whiz,' as she put it. Tachi had joined him while they waited.

"You're from Konoha?" Tachi said so conversationally as to be unnatural.

"Was," he answered tersely.

"The Hyuuga. Wow."

"Yeah."

"Hey," he ventured, glancing back toward his teammates (who were trying not to look like they were looking.) "I've heard a whole bunch of…of weird stuff about the Hyuuga. "That they have these…marks on their forehead and use brain control on their weaker members and stuff and the Clan Head has, like, twenty wives and…"

"I thought Kabuto instructed you on foreign shinobi clans," he said shortly, vaguely horrified, acutely annoyed.

"He… he did. But you hear stuff."

"Stuff?"

"Yeah." He was blushing now. "Stuff. So any of that true?"

"No."

"Ah."

Tachi's brilliantly marigold eyes were packing heat and if Neji had to hazard a guess, the boy's ability laid somewhere in making eye to eye contact with his victim, because he kept trying to angle himself around so Neji would look at him.

"So…how's it work?"

"Clan secret."

"Aww…why?" she whined. "You're a missing-nin now."

"Alright then, how do _your_ eyes work?"

He stiffened; shocked that he'd ask such a thing. "I can't tell you! It's secret!"

"Ah."

Tachi grumbled and fell into step alongside him. "Okay, fine, but could you at least…I dunno. Tell me why I haven't seen you with all the other jounin mentors?"'

"I was in the process of defecting." _And Kabuto was beating the living shit out of me for days on end._

"Is that it?" Tachi inquired earnestly, blinking very hard at him.

Neji held his gaze steady. "Yes."

Tachi's eyes were very wide now. "_Really_? That's it? _Nothing_ else?"

"No."

"Really?" He was no longer blinking by then.

"Your doujutsu is some kind of hypnosis, am I right?" Neji inquired pointedly.

Tachi jumped guiltily, startled. "No, I…it was just…yeah, but…"

"That kind of thing doesn't work on the Byakugan. Sharingan hypnosis is the only doujutsu that does. You'd know that if you paid attention in Kabuto's lectures."

"Yeah, but how'd you…"

"I read your profile."

"Oh, well if that…Hey! Wait a second you already knew all our names then! Why'd you make us do introductions!?"

"…just to see if you would."

Tachi sputtered for a minute in childish chagrin, various oaths and profanities spilling out of the shinobi rugrat while Neji calculated how long it would take to get to a proper stopping place tonight.

- - -

**Ninja Information**

Name: Hebita, Minami  
Registration ID: 000244  
Hidden Village: Sound  
Rank: Genin  
Team: -

Element: Earth

**Physical Information**

Age: 12  
Sex: Female  
Birthday: 6/21  
Bloodtype: A  
Height: 148.2 cm  
Weight: 34.9 kg

**Notable features** _Has achieved fluency in Sound field-code. Exhibits understanding of chuunin level taijutsu and a select few jounin-level ninjutsu techniques while working in tandem with her twin sister in combat. (refer to file ID#: 000245) Individually, student exhibits talent for inventing offensive jutsu, some of which have received merit from members of the Sound elite. Notably: 1 – Hebita Bing-Bang; 2 – Firecracker Flash; 3 – Mum Technique (Note: names were of student's own invention) _

_Lacks in basic genjutsu skills. Student possesses a temper and has been reprimanded for rash behavior during practice missions. Student grows despondent when separated from her sister for prolonged periods of time and is incorrigibly competitive with male genin. (refer to file ID# 000239, 000251, 000245, 000255, 00232) Though student works well in a team, she displays signs of brass independence in regular situations. Lacks patience and ability to strategize on the fly. _

- - -

"Yo."

Minami had moved away from where her genin teammates were pretending to eat their sandwiches and talk about the weather (they were, in fact, watching every move Neji made) and was currently standing precariously close to Neji's lunch. Not that he was particularly hungry, but that idea that his student might think it acceptable to very nearly stand on his food seemed rude so he was inclined to be curt with her.

"Yes, Minami?"

The little girl made a face and jammed one finger in her ear, wriggling it about thoughtfully. "I just wanted to tell you…" she said, flicking whatever she'd excavated from her eardrum into the bushes, "make one thing clear."

And then she went on to make more (far more) than one thing clear. By about the twentieth thing – including the three times she'd called him 'crap' – the young Hyuuga's attention was drifting. Neji tried very hard to look as if he were taking her seriously…but he wasn't. Her hair was just so damn bouncy and it was distracting his skills at politeness. Hell, even Sakura's bubblicious frock behaved itself; Minami's was a frothing mess of Valentine's Day ribbon curls exploding out of her scalp like frosting. She was a jabbering cupcake. She stopped finally to take a breath and he managed to interject: "Mmmhmm…" with great sincerity.

"I also think you're crap," Minami said, as if for the first time.

"Mmmhmm…"

"And I think you're a jerk."

"Hmm…"

And I think, this mission is gonna be…kinda tough."

"Mmmhmm…"

"Me'n my sister are like _this_, okay?" she crossed her middle and index finger. "And she's real important to me."

"Mmm…"

"So if things get really tough, I can take care of myself. Don't help me. I don't need your stupid help."

"Hmm…"

"You…you help Nishi-chan. Okay?"

Neji glanced over to where Nishi was twiddling her thumbs and smiling shyly while Tachi serenaded her with tales of his many exploits as a first class genin (which included taking down three missing-nin while blindfolded apparently). The teen jounin turned back to Minami and nodded, feeling all the more like a monster as he did.

"I can do that, Minami-san."

"Thanks, Neji-sensei," she said with an uncharacteristically soft smile. Then she glowered and added, "But I still think you're a jerk. Tachi told me about the genin files you cheeky bastard."

He took a small bite of his sandwich. "Yes, but _now_ I know you won't steal my pickled plums," he replied.

"_Eeeeeeeew_!"

- - -

That night, while the three Sound shinobi-to-be sleep peacefully around the embers of their small fire, Neji sat with his back to the base of a trunk. Watching their eyes twitch in their dreams – seeking out enemies in fantasy tree branches, hurling kunai into the throats of faceless goons, chasing cupcakes through fields of daisies – he rubbed his dry hands and tried to decide if he could kill them to save himself.

**Author's Note:**

_I am more than painfully aware how thinly written this chapter is! THANK YOU! I've failed. Sorry to everyone who reads this. I'm sorry. _

_Thanks to __**Katterree Fengari**__for being so nice and observant. As to your question about that 'ultimate move never used on humans' if you've ever seen the Neji vs. Kidomaru fight (the episode, not the managa) it's the move he uses on the spiders. My shtick is that move is not a traditionally Hyuuga move, but one he developed on his own and only he can do. It's like his trademark technique to himself. As usual __**Beboots**__ and__**Dayadhvam**__ have been ridiculously supportive. And to answer some of Dayadhvam's questions: 1 – Yes, Itachi should pop up again. 2 – Because crazy likes company and Neji is so pushing crazy by now. _

_Next chapter: fear of committing an unpardonable sin_


	10. Lyssophobia

**Lyssophobia**

* * *

_:fear of dealing with insanity_

* * *

_Everyone's chakra system is inherently different; some complex, some simple, some weak, some strong. Any good ninja knows a strong chakra system is the primary base for truly powerful ninjutsu. The most complicated system he'd ever seen belonged to Uzumaki Naruto. It was the reason he'd missed that first tenketsu in the Chuunin Exams three years ago. There was a direct correlation. Naruto also had the most chakra of any person he'd ever seen. As a rule the more chakra you have, the more complicated your inner system. _

_Anatomically most Hyuuga have simple chakra systems, not for lack of chakra, but for efficiency. Byakugan is the one doujutsu which allows the user to manipulate their own chakra system. This ability to shape the coil-system is part of the reason Hyuuga ninja, despite having less chakra, can and do outlast their opponents. While others expend unnecessary amounts of energy routing their power through overly complex systems, a Hyuuga's inner chakra pathways are lazy, minimalist, taking the least amount of effort possible to summon up their power. _

_Therefore he was more than aware that something was glaringly wrong with him. (It seemed everything was glaringly wrong with him, lately.)_

_He'd tried to quicken the regeneration of some damaged chakra paths through his shoulder (hoping to catch his captors off guard. They'd never suspect he was almost well enough to break a wall down). This is when he discovered the __wrong__. His inner coil system, usually pristine and unassailable inside the warm, flesh and blood of his body, was suddenly all kinds of haywire. Like a series of firecrackers had gone off throughout his system, sudden random ricochets of chakra branched madly like weeds from between cracks in a well-worn road, strands of bluish ivy flung out into his skin. _

_Neji couldn't explain the sudden spiral of uncontrollable growth. Inner coil systems grow with chakra, a process that takes months, even years, of training and experience to achieve. One simply did not have a chakra 'growth spurt'. It just didn't happen. Raised Hyuuga, Neji grew up not liking surprises. This is probably why despite being friends with them, he doesn't like Naruto or Lee, however that works. This inexplicable chakra increase made no sense, therefore he didn't like it. It was just another freakish mutation that he didn't want or need to make this whole 'escape in one piece' thing work out like he wanted._

_Kabuto would have a field day if he found out. _

- - -

It was nearly four when Neji noticed they had company. It came to him as more of a feeling than anything – the shinobi 'someone's-gonna-stab-you-lots' sense again. Then he took it on himself to more closely inspect the forest around him and discovered a pair of fast moving blurs zipping and darting about in the underbrush. Jounin. A-class. He pretended, of course, that he hadn't noticed and was about snap and click 'enemy' to his team when Nishi began to whistle 'I'm Happy Go Lucky' to herself. A popular civilian pop-song of the month, and the random normalcy of it struck a funny chord in Neji's gut. Her genin peers immediately gaped at her and even Neji turned his head to stare.

Nishi continued to whistle – rather a bit too innocently – and rolled her eyes pointedly to her left before sneaking in a quick click-snap:

'_Enemy_.'

_Well, she beat me to it._ Instantly the two other students grew narrow-eyed and alert. Neji merely arched a brow at Nishi because somehow a rookie genin had just detected two dead-silent jounin class ninja running through the surrounding foliage.

"Sound-code?" Minami hissed urgently.

"They're coming at us. Don't bother."

Nishi gripped her sister's hand reflexively, eyes huge.

"Oh no."

Neji's Byakugan came violently active. "You three Body Flicker! _Now_!"

"What? Why –?" Tachi began, but it was too late.

The two jounin crashed through the canopy, hurling shuriken in a hundred whining swarms at the four Sound shinobi. Minami and Nishi caught spinning razor edges in the gut and throat, before popping into two stumpy looking logs. (Neji suspected strongly that Nishi was responsible for her sister's speedy getaway) This gave Neji time to lunge left and tackle Tachi off the branch he'd frozen on. He snatched the skinny genin up like a particularly annoying sack of rice and backhanded the incoming shuriken with messy Kaiten, pinning the boy against his chest while metal ricocheted and rocketed off his chakra like high-velocity silverware shot against a brick wall.

Recognizing what they were up against, the two jounin split up instantly to flank him and Neji spun, yanking Tachi behind him and putting child and genius back-to-back. Neji could feel the genin shaking behind him, two handfuls of shuriken clattering in his unsteady grasp. With reason, Neji consented. The two ninja bore no mark, only pair of featureless porcelain masks, slashed through with abrupt jags of red and black…the masks of hunter-nin.

_Damn_.

Tachi was breathing a little fast, chakra coursing heavily through his skinny body. Neji squeezed his arm slightly, never looking away from his opponent.

"Calm down," he murmured to the boy. "You're with me."

Tachi's note quavered as he whistled and clicked messily _'They are Cloud-nin.'_

"Trust me…I know."

"Well, we're finding all kind of prizes today," mused the Red Stripe shinobi.

"Yes," said the Black Stripe. "What's a Konoha hawk doing so far from of its cage?"

"Oh _God_, the bird metaphors," Neji said loudly then blinked because he surprised himself with his own voice.

The Red Stripe – who seemed to have the sense of humor between the two – chuckled a little at that. "Well, well, this bird's kind of chatty."

Black Stripe was thoughtful. "If he's unbranded..."

"Can't tell," replied Red Stripe.

"We'll find out soon enough," answered Black.

"What the heck do you jerks want?!" Tachi blurted, interrupting the annoying back and forth conversation.

"I think you probably know," said Red Stripe. "Seeing how it's your family who did it."

The Black Stripe hunter-nin nodded to Tachi. "That child is a member of the Aori Clan. A traitor to his country and his hidden village, as – I might add – _you_ appear to be, Hyuuga." The man dropped a summoning scroll into his palm. "You we can stand to have alive, if you wish, and the little genin girls may go too, as the Hidden Cloud has no interest in them." Neji watched tensely as the man unclipped the slap of his scroll. "The boy dies, however. All of the Aori clan is to die."

"Hmm," remarked Neji, kicking a shuriken loose from the branch at his foot.

Red Stripe had unstrapped a vicious looking kusurigama from his back and begun to swing the sickle blade lazily from its chain. "You are a user of a secret bloodline; you understand very well, do you not, Hyuuga-san?"

"Very well," he agreed, nodding, Byakugan blazing white hot and fire in his brain. "…which is why I would never let you take this child's life."

"Aww," sneer Red. "That's so –,"

Black Stripe didn't let the banter get any farther because he noticed that about twenty words previous Neji had body flickered. (The split second when he kicked the shuriken loose, their eyes had followed its flashing fall.) And just as the Black stripe ripped his scroll open the real Neji hurdled out of the ether and slammed a bone-shattering round house into Red Stripe's strong arm. The scream of pain jarred with the feral roar of the cougar summon and Neji barely body-flickered before the giant tawny cat sank its fangs into the hapless piece of wood. He darted down through the canopy, his opponents searching the leaves blindly, he seeing through them and laying trigger wire like fishing line behind him. Tangent to him, Nishi and Minami were standing hand-in-hand and clicking softly through the radio.

'_Ready...Go? Go?'_

Neji broke cover and lunged into the open air, chakra blazing down the wire like fire on threads of gasoline.

"NOW!"

The trigger-wire trap exploded out of the leaves, shimmering gossamer razor wire yanking closed so fast mind boggled. Black Stripe threw himself clear and Red Stripe managed to scramble under the deadly webbing, but only just into time to catch the twins as they lunged out of the underbrush, Minami spinning her sister like a bolo and hurling her, flaming chakra, into the belly of the gob-smacked jounin. Nishi hit him with expert timing, Sakura Haruno expert timing, energy bursting on exact contact the hitting the man with force equated only to a speeding freight train. Neji saw his jaw shatter the same instant he landed on the branch parallel the Black Stripe ninja. He was flanked instantly by the cougar summon on his left and for a moment the combatants slowed.

Black Stripe spared no attention for his comrade; he'd heard the gruesome crackle of bone and enamel.

"It was a mistake," Neji said softly. "Bringing a rookie on a mission like this."

"It was supposed to be a B-class mission," said Black Stripe bitterly. Neji could see him smiling through the mask, a sad and furious darkness. "Guess you never expect A-class clan members to be working the other side."

"You can turn and leave now," Neji offered. "Your partner is dead and Tachi just caught your summon in his hypnosis."

Black Stripe glanced almost casually over. Tachi was inching along the branch toward the monstrous animal, hands out, yellow eyes wide and glowing radio-active yellow in the dim shadows of the trees. The cougar was growling low and anxiously, but suffering from erratic muscle twitches indicative of having been mentally paralyzed. Neji was familiar with the feeling and sympathized. Black Stripe sighed and tilted his head back, inspecting the trees in a resigned kind of way.

"What's your name?" he asked the trees overhead.

"Why?" Neji inquired.

"It's not like a rogue Hyuuga stays secret among hunters."

"Nevertheless, you'll have to find out on your own."

"Your girls killed my brother," he remarked.

"_I _killed your brother," Neji corrected. "If you want vengeance it's with me. I'm their sensei. You quarrel's with me, not children."

He laughed. "You _are_ a child."

"Not since I was four. Are you going?"

He paused, studying Neji thoughtfully. "I've seen you," he said thoughtfully. "I'm sure of it."

"Then finding me again will be easy," Neji shot back coldly. "Go."

The man looked him and and down once more, then dismissed his summon. Tachi dashed to Neji's side as the Cloud-nin leapt down from the branch. "Orochimaru will devour you and everything you are," he warned Neji, lifting the body of his younger brother in his arms, broken and twisted. Nishi and Minami melted out of the shadows at Neji's back, chakra pooling in them like one girl in two skins. "All of you. He's destroyed the Aori Clan. He destroys everything he touches and you'll know that soon enough."

Then he was gone.

Neji watched him go, the tone of his last syllables resonating through his brain: _'you'll know that.'_ He deactivated his Bykugan and left himself wonder when he'd see the Cloud-nin again. Finally, he spared a glance for his team, standing trembling and exultant around him. They seemed to have been shell-shocked into dead quiet; each of them staring blankly into the leaves like lightening had struck.

Minami broke the quiet first. "Oh my God! We just beat a pair of jounin! We rock so hard!"

Tachi doubled over and puked.

Nishi didn't say anything. Just stood there, staring at her hands with a kind of cool calculation. Neji wondered if that was the first time she'd killed someone. He wondered if he should say something. But she merely shook her hands loose and smiled at him, green eyes brimming quietly. Brimming with what exactly, his Byakugan didn't say, but he suspected it was the precise color of beetle wings and gasoline.

"Good job. You're not dead," Neji congratulated them. "You're the luckiest genin alive."

They took off again in silence.

- - -

_They placed restrictions on him, obviously, because branded or not an enemy-nin is an enemy-nin. The door to his room was crosshatched and patch-worked with enough chakra seals and barrier jutsu to stop a charging bull summon, to say nothing of a recovering Hyuuga teenager. Though, Kabuto had to place more of them in the surrounding walls after Neji blasted a hole through the stone (because there weren't any barrier seals in the walls) and made a break for it a few days after his incarceration. The resulting chase scene had brought three of the new Sound Four and Kabuto himself down on the young Hyuuga who beat the living daylights out of Ban, broke Takon's flawless nose and launched Juri through another wall. In the end Kabuto stepped in and floored him with a combination barrier jutsu and a seriously unpleasant paralysis toxin, compliments of Juri (he figured out just then that she specialized in airborne poisons) who'd recovered from the wall launching a few minutes prior._

Juri: poison expert

_While Kabuto set up the new holding jutsus and repaired the gaping hole in the wall, she took the opportunity to lick her tongue up the back of his neck. _

…and a nymphomaniac.

- - -

"Hey…"

Neji shifted his weight a little, thinking.

"_Psst_!"

'_Three of them…could I take them all on my own?'_

"Oi!"

'_Probably but I'd expend all my chakra…'_

"_Hyuuga-sensei_."

He glowered.

"Yes, Minami-san?"

"I'm boooooored."

Nishi sniggered somewhere through the slightly fuzzy radio waves. The mic in his ear brought Minami's whining into such clarity, however, it seemed as though the pink-haired genin were sitting on his toes and not, in fact, hiding up a tree somewhere in the forest. The young jounin lifted two fingers to the receiver at his throat, whispering very clearly, very tersely in reply the very same thing he'd been saying all night to Minami's whining:

"Just wait."

"_Phffft_!"

"Do you guys ever shut up?" Tachi griped somewhere in the bushes to the east. "And how damn long are we just going to sit around waiting for? This is boring as hell."

"You'd rather rush in and die a horrible death?" Neji retorted evenly. "We've only been sitting here five minutes. It took you guys twenty to get in position."

"Only because Tachi doesn't speak field-code properly."

"Bite me!"

Minami whistled something that included the words 'you', 'eat' and a 'shoe'…or 'exploding tag'. The two words were inexplicably similar. Neji jerked himself out of field-code musing and refocused on the chuunin patrolling the perimeter. Two of them were smoking not more than fifty meters off from him, chatting about the cold and what parts of their anatomy were falling off as a result. The other scout seemed to be taking his job seriously, but he was the weakest of the three guards – most likely his insecurity kept him from relaxing. He'd claimed to have heard something no less than five times in the last twenty minutes, but the smokers ignored him like this was a commonly heard complaint.

"Hey, Tachi?"

"Yeah, Hyuuga?"

Neji ignored the sarcasm. "Can you see the three guards?"

A pause. "Yeeeeah…"

"I'm gonna take out the smokers together, but you have to keep their jumpy friend quiet. There's still two other guys inside." Neji swung silently from the lowest branch, landing on the mossy forest floor without a sound. "No telling how strong he just looking at him, but he's holding hostages. There are other bodies in there. Civilians from what I can tell. Staff maybe." He crept forward, sidling up behind the two men as they breathed fire into the tip of their cigarettes. "We do this silently. Alright…"

Then there came a resounding crash from the other side of the forest. Neji froze. The two ninja spun around, startled to alertness and only by suppressing his chakra signature completely did he avoid setting off that shinobi 'someone-is-behind-me' radar most assassins have. Every particle of his brain honed on not moving any molecule of his body, the young Hyuuga could do nothing but stare stupidly at the back of his targets, swear oaths to kill the little brats for being so damn loud and mentally will his prey to somehow just not look behind them. From the other side of the clearing came yet another crack of snapping wood and a split second later Minami came barreling out of the tree line, dead silent, but careening and slammed her fist into face of the shocked third scout.

It was like someone socked him with a cannon ball. He went down hard, plowing a forty-foot groove of ugly dirt in the grass.

The downed man's teammates were so flabbergasted – Minami was looking exceptionally scrawny and _pink_ for a dangerous shinobi assailant – they both let their cigarettes drop from their opened mouths and gaped in perfect tandem.

"That looked…painful," Neji remarked, having snuck up on them during the disturbance.

They spun around, but not fast enough to stop him and he clocked them both viciously in the back of the neck. Chakra slammed between their third and forth cervical vertebra and rendered the men incapable of speech, dropping them like rag dolls to the grass. Not even a whimper. Neji judged the blows to be critical, but not fatal and moved silently over the fallen shinobi, checking them over to see if they were conscious. The paralyzed men made vague gargling sounds of protest, but nothing more. In one blow, the Hyuuga had effectively blockaded all possible chakra control. Neji frowned. Neither of the men bore the familiar Cloud insignia of their Hidden Village. This seemed too minor an outpost to play politically neutral.

Filing his sudden suspicions away for later he turned his attention back to his 'students'. A few hundred meters off, Minami had trussed her victim like turkey and was dragging him by the back of his flak jacket to join him. He eyed her coolly; face a familiar mask of irritated disdain he usually reserved for Lee and… and Lee. She didn't miss the aura of annoyance radiating from her young sensei and made a grotesque face.

"Whaaat?"

"I asked Tachi to take care of it," he told her.

"So? _I_ took care of it, big deal."

"Yes and it was very nicely done, for a freight train. You'll make a fine battering ram one day." He fingered the radio at his throat. "Nishi? You in position?"

She whistled her affirmative.

"Tachi? Come out and help Minami guard our friends. I'm going in to see about the last ninja." Minami kicked the grass petulantly while Tachi materialized from the foliage, looking cheated and ready to holler about it, but he shot the boy a readily understandable 'shut-up-or-I'll-kill-you' look. Once the other genin was reasonably terrified, he broke eye-contact and moved toward the main entrance, tugging a kunai from his belt. Nishi was laying down a clever network of concealment jutsu while she strung the back door with tripwire. Neji didn't think they'd be necessary, but it was a sound idea. The gas bomb was a nice touch.

Neji didn't waste time tip-toeing around the door – you only did that in suspenseful horror-movies – but simply strolled up and shoved it open, the scouts having left it unlocked after leaving last time. The last chuunin looked just as startled as the last three, mouth popping open in flabbergasted surprise that just didn't feel right for a mid-ranking Cloud-nin. Neji snapping his wrist forward and hurled his kunai in the man's thigh. There was a _thunk_ of meat and metal, effectively stopping any retreat and wrenching an awful roar of pain from the man. He dropped to the floor, taking papers and documents with him, then – having gained the floor – he spent some time howling and rolling around there, getting blood on things. Neji decided this wasn't proper behavior for a mid-rank Cloud-nin and put his other kunai away.

Minami's voice crackled over the radio. "Yo, sensei? What's going on?"

"Nothing," he responded, eyeing the man wearily. "Civilian. Not a shinobi, but stay outside until I secure everything."

"Neji-sensei…" Nishi began uncertainly.

"Just stay outside, Nishi. I'll handle it." He approached the fallen man carefully, keeping just out of reach. "Okay. Nice and easy. Why are you here?"

"I didn't mean to make them like this. It was just…it was the chemicals and their blood-line-limit."

Neji let that sink in for a minute. "Uh-huh. What else?"

"I couldn't keep them going."

"What are you talking about?"

"Stupid sluts!"

"Yes. That's nice. Where are they?"

"I just…" those watery eyes were rolling away, looking into something else, "…just need more time." He hovered there a moment, staring off into nothing…then his eyes snapped back to Neji. A weird light igniting behind his eyes, an irrepressible madness. He staggered up, his mouth a gaping snarl in his sagging face, bared teeth slimy with spit. "I couldn't stop the _reactions_! I had to – _I had to_ – fix them... I never meant for things to go this far, but when they don't give you what you need you just have to make due. I meant to refuse, but I had to keep working. I had to and those _stupid little sluts_, just couldn't process the chemicals. I tried, but they're all negatives. And now, and now they send effeminate _children_ to kill me! _Me_! "

"You are two syllables away from a castration," Neji informed him.

"What are you? Twelve?"

"Sixteen, thanks. How about this: tell me where the test subjects are or I'll kill you?"

The man just devolved into a dithering mess of angry muttering and didn't get around to answering. Neji sighed, punched him smartly across the back of the head and watched the scientist topple over. Now. Where was that research notebook he'd seen?

"Hyuuga! What the hell is that?" Tachi snarled through the radio.

Neji flipped the man off the fallen papers with his foot. "Stay outside and guard the perimeter. I'll deal with this."

"Define 'this'."

"None of your genin-rank business."

There was snickering over the airwaves and Neji resumed searching.

Rifling through the paper on the desk, Neji would have been more successful reading brail than the dysfunctional dithering scribbled here. The nature of the experiments was an invasive kind, not nice by any means – unfriendly looking chemical names kept popping up under dosage measurements – or much for the health of their patients. Neji had been in the reconnaissance field a very long time (by short-lived shinobi standards anyway) and he'd seen enough of war crimes to develop a definite sixth sense to an abomination in the making.

There were…diagrams. Bisections and cross-hatch anatomical sketches of dissected eyeballs and flay cornea peeled back off irises and emotionless little arrows labeling each abnormal piece. If Konoha had been at odds with the Lightening Country this might actually be a gold mine. As it was – that creeping nauseous feeling that meant trouble had steadily inched up inside his stomach, tying it in knots.

He recognized the bloodline limit from the BINGO Book in Konoha. Small Lightening Country secret clan that everyone gossiped about but never spoke of – the hypnotic stare. More potent than Sharingan hypnosis, less dangerous than the pin-wheel eyes despite. Much like Byakugan it was considered less dangerous than Sharingan. Neji reflected dourly that Sharingan had a monopoly on powerful eyes and was inclined to be bitter on instinct…then he remembered all but two of them were dead. Well…three if you got technical, but he didn't have time to think about this.

The Hyugga wandered over to a promising looking side-door and after an obligatory check up – booby-traps and erasers balanced on the lintel you know – wrenched it open.

The knots in his stomach came violently undone and he retched, clapping a hand over his nose and mouth before either the smell or the – _Oh fuck! Fuck! _– sight could empty bile all over the floor. Neji pivoted away from the room and slammed his back against the wall by the door jam, gagging and choking, both hands clamped over his mouth to hold back the vomit and the monster of acid evil trying to claw its way out of his throat.

The young jounin slid to the floor, shaking, a weird shivering tingle jittering through his entire body like horrible electricity. Like Orochimaru had caught him in that awful venom induced limbo again, he could do nothing but stand there wide-eyed and shuddering. He was breathing too fast, his diagram clenching and trying to jolt his insides loose. His eyes rushed hot with chakra and tears and he couldn't tell if he was crying because they were dead – horribly, hideously, cruelly dead – or because he was the one to see them or because every one of them looked like Hinata and Hanabi.

"Neji-sensei? What's going on in there?" Nishi's sugary, kitten-loving voice inquired through the wavelengths.

He made a funny retching sound.

"What the hell was that?" Tachi sounded grossed out.

"I'm switching frequencies," Neji rasped.

"Hey! Whoa! What the freaking heck is going on in there?" Minami demanded.

"Why?" Nishi inquired.

"What is it? Something secret?" Tachi eagerly blurted.

"Neji-sensei?"

"Hyuuga?"

"Hyuuga-san?"

"_Just do as I say,"_ he hissed, choking back the ugly, clawing thing on the back of his tongue. "This is not a fucking democracy. That's an order, shinobi. Stay put and hold your positions. And I can _see_ you understand?"

Radio silence.

He switched frequencies.

"Fuck," he whispered and the curse was more of a sob.

He lurched to his feet and found the radio phone in the desk, dialing the number given to him at his briefing this morning. It was still hours before the deadline and he hated being too early for any deadline (made you look too eager to please) but he couldn't hold off on this one. As always, as usual he couldn't move without understanding. He hated that his whole body shook, his hands shuddering as they held the earpiece to the side of his head, his teeth literally chattering with the force of his physical reaction. Neji listened to the ringing, three times ringing, four times, five times six – _Click_!

"Neji-kun." Kabuto's voice was warm as a brother's. "How goes the mission?"

"You're a sick piece of shit, Kabuto."

"Well then! You found the old labs right?"

"_Fuck_ _you_."

"Good. Excellent. I need you to collect the research notes and a couple of the DNA samples, then. They're probably in a cooler somewhere. If not, I'll have to ask you to collect a couple yourself. Blood and epidurals please. And optical fluids of course. Then burn the lab and those men won't you. We're setting up a new base elsewhere."

"There are _children_ in here."

"Yes?" He sounded _puzzled_, the monsterous bastard. "Bato-san wanted to prove his usefulness. He failed. It was all wasted work."

The room was spinning. The earth was tilting on its axis and reeling like a crazed and suicidal meteorite into the sun. The air in the room felt sarcophagus tight and he struggling to stand upright while everything around him ceased to logically follow…again. "Orochimaru," he said at last, raking his fingers through his hair so hard he might have broken skin. "That Cloud-nin was right."

"What about a Cloud-nin?"

"I _won't_ do this."

"You won't?"

"No."

"You _won't_?"

"I said no."

"Never?"

"_Yes_."

"Well, then, I'll just have to incapacitate you and come out there and do it myself." Neji could hear him arranging things on a table somewhere miles away, calm and utterly unaffected. "But if I do. It will take me all day to get there. Your genin team will have to come in and see what's going on eventually, which would be unfortunate so early on in the game. You saw your father dead when you were six and. You barely side-stepped sororicide. Sasuke saw his clan dead at eight and has been involved in active fratricide for the last seven years. I'm sure it won't take a stretch of the imagination to see what something like this would do to your team."

There was something sweet in the air…like sugar…or formaldehyde. "I _don't_ follow."

"Did you read much of the research?"

"..."

"No? Tsk, Neji-kun. And I thought you were a former R&R. Well, if you care to take a look you'd recognize the Kingan. The Golden Eye of the Aori Clan is a rare bloodline. Luckily, it's the males that carry the gene mutation. You've got a very special little boy on your team, Neji-kun. I think he's got a cousin or two in there. And a niece. I'm pretty sure his niece is in that lab too. How recognizable are the corpses? Neji?"

He didn't say anything. He'd swallowed his tongue.

"Sundown Neji. I'll talk with you for the de-briefing." He paused. "Sometimes…ignorance is the best thing for a child." Then he hung up.

He put the phone back in its drawer and picked up the fallen papers, sliding them in a neat manila folder. Then he searched the rest of the room for paperwork and stacked the documents together. The fridge was full of little vials and micro-tubes in holding racks. Neji tried like hell not to see the labels, the chemical content, the cruel cocktail of intravenous muck they'd pumped in. He kicked cupboards and closets open until he found an insulated satchel under the sink, a purple lunch-box looking carrying case that made him sick again.

The neatly packed the tubes inside, the final remains and testament to a horrible, horrible thing. Then he emptied his hip catch of blast notes and set them all over the room. In the lab the world blinked into his brain in snapshots: white stretches of naked, prepubescent flesh stiffened and molded by rigor mortis and time. Ragged, brittle, shoot-me-now orange hair, weakened by malnutrition and poison. Gaping, blackened holes where they should have been staring back at him. One had hemorrhaged and the blood pooled in a black puddle inside her skin, like a syrup filled sack. One sulfur-colored eye, jelly rupturing from around the iris, wept glistening fluids still.

Nishi was standing at the door waiting for him went he got out, wide green eyes blinking alive and worried up at him.

"Neji-sensei. Are you alright?" she whispered.

A mad part of him wanted to grab her by the throat and strangle her. A madder part wanted to pick her up and kiss her still breathing mouth.

"I'm fine Nishi-chan. You three go on ahead." He handed her the DNA carrier. "Take this."

Tachi was crouched in the grass by the two men Neji had hit, poking them with the blunt end of his kunai. "These guys are dead," he pronounced, his toxic yellow eyes narrowed and annoyed. Neji could see that didn't bother him much and part of him feverishly fantasized throwing the genin in with his dead family and slamming the door shut on him. Give it a couple days. What was the '-cide' word for killing cousins? He dismissed the phantom thought.

"Throw them inside then. The other guy too. We're done here."

Minami hefted the men over her tiny shoulders like over-long pillows and shot Tachi a superior 'beat-that-if-you-can' look. The boy glowered, dragging the other chunnin (the one whose skull Minami had fractured) after. "Show off."

"Pussy," she retorted loudly.

"Bitch."

"Bastard!"

"_Pink_!"

"You take that _back_!"

Neji blew up the lab from a distance and they watched the building burn for a while. Then he led his team back to the Sound.

**Author's Note: **

_Sorry. Sorry. __Sorry. This story just ran dry. Seriously. I was dead and out of ideas forever. _

_I don't know if this chapter is any good after all this time, but I've got it up anyhow and I apologize to all you brilliant readers who are putting up with me. _

_Dedications go to __**Psychotic Midnight**__ for being impatient enough to yell at me and __**Beboot**__ for world's longest and nicest review. Seriously That this was massive. _

_**Dayadhvam**__for catching my typos as usual. Thanks. Finally, __**Katterree Fengari**__: I don't know if I'm trying to get serious. _

_This fic is just so absurd it's hard to get a bead on how Neji should be reacting at all. If not, chock it up to his going crazy. _

_I dunno. _


	11. Hypnophobia

**Hypnophobia**

* * *

_: fear of being hypnotised_

* * *

_He is tearing someone's face off. _

_He hasn't decided specifically why, but he feels that he is somehow justified in his decision to do so in the first place and he'll work out the details in another couple seconds or so, once the last of the flesh comes loose. Ripping wetly from the whole with these raw sucking noises that sound a lot like yanking a giant sticker off a table. Neji giggles because he's always been prone to giggling when he does something like this, a little habit he declines to tell Tenten because if she ever, ever finds out – fuckingbitchknowingwhatIdon'tGod – he'll rip her face off too. He giggles, hysterically this time and squishes the slippery pink rag-thing between his fingers, balling it up and tossing it in the trash nearby._

_He tries to think what ANBU will do when they come, taking in the lidless opaque orbs that are currently staring at him from the gory wreckage of her skull, the bloody pencil-wide circles punched all across her body like pokadots. They won't look in the trash.' That'll be,' he thinks, 'the last place they look.' They'll think he took the face, like a trophy or a keepsake or some other equally retarded psychobabble motivation that has nothing to do with his reason for ripping this particular face off this particular skull. He's kneeling, carpet digging funny grooves into his knees because he's straddling her chest, sitting on her little breasts and staring, staring, staring at the meaty hunk that was supposed to be…_

"_Neji?"_

_He twitches. _

"_Neji?" Lidless eyes swivel wetly in their sockets, fixate on him. "Neji?" _

"_No," he says._

"_Neji?" Her hand moved to his thigh, she's pushing herself up, pushing him off to give herself room to sit up. "Neji?_

"_No," he sobs._

"_Neji?" Fingers patting blindly in his hair, tracing sticky reddish lines across his cheek, over his mouth, putting blood on his tongue. "Neji?"_

"_Nonono…"_

"_Neji-nii-san?"_

_- - -_

"_Do you understand this feeling?_ _The decision from which there is no undoing?"_

"_Is your hatred sufficient?"_

- - -

Neji woke up dry-eyed and not screaming at all. Dimly he realized he should have been. One of his hands, he noticed in that blank way so suddenly necessary for him, was bleeding sluggishly from broken nail-beds where he'd clawed the wall in his sleep and tried to dig himself out of his nightmares. He was _whimpering_. Amid it all, little bolts of pain kept zipping exquisitely behind his optic nerve, triggering a reflexive arc in his spine each one more searing, more hideously maddening than the last and all at once he realized his Byakugan was active. With a cold shudder heard his father saying to his three-year-old self,_ "Byakugan doesn't activate on its own."_

Neji dispersed it quickly.

Dripping sweat, soaked through with it, like it had rained sea water while he slept, the rookie jounin sat up in the dark and tried to claw his bangs messily out of his face. It was only a dream and his eyes ached _exactly_ – so much for the healing power of the eyes – like they had before, the doujutsu straining to activate in accordance with the chemicals the dream triggered in his brain. In the back of his mind he could hear the drawling explanation, burned unwillingly into his memory, recited like a mantra, said like a schoolroom lecture:

"_The training for regular doujutsu requires a ninja to stimulate certain chemical balances in the occipital lobe with chakra to enhance the average human functions of the visual cortex. Emotions release different neurotransmitters to supplement what you're feeling, providing you with the sensations and reactions of those emotions. Different doujutsu require different chemicals, different emotions to activate the ability, some as simple as adrenaline and dopamine. But once triggered, chakra manipulation will allow the user to generate those chemicals levels at will and eventually the technique will no longer require those actual emotions to utilize it._

"_The regrettable side affect is, from time to time, the technique may become unintentionally active if enough chemical stimulates are provided. In these cases, it might become possible to trigger a technique from merely being in the right mood for it." _

Apparently he was in the mood for it.

That scared him.

That scared him so much it _hurt_.

The implications made him sick, made him so deeply afraid that he didn't even know how to react to it in any fashion outside of shaking and just sitting, not breathing and hoping if he held _still_ long enough time would stand still—then trap him in inertia.

He wrapped trembling arms around himself and bit back the rising sob in his throat, the one trying to crawl up the back of his throat, out of his nightmare and into reality. He choked it down. Panicking would not help him. His goal remained the same as it ever had: to escape. And to achieve that goal he needed to outwit his captors and to do that he needed to be sane and to be sane he needed to _not_ use that jutsu and to _not_ let himself get worked up just because synapses in his brain were firing in a familiar memory pattern.

'_Stop it! Stop! You do not go to pieces on the field! You do not! Don't think about. Don't think about it. Don't!'_

He was breathing hard now, head aching furiously, the buzzing fever pitch rising up behind his eyes.

All carbonized and pressurized inside his ribs, deep inside, stealing his breathing space and poisoning his thoughts, coloring them with macabre red. He needed …shit. He needed to get rid of it somehow, to cauterize this sick, festering _thing_ in him. It made him feel so cold. So hypnotically easy, malleable, like you could ask anything of him and it wasn't too much – The option. The ultimately selfish choice: a thing so absolute that even a born killer, an assassin, a shinobi, recoiled from the word. A filthy, forbidden word – _murder_ – The hideous decision to which there was no undoing, no respite, no reversing. And he knew. That was the worst damn part, was the _knowing_. Knowing he couldn't take it back.

Hinata…a fucking room full of them. A room of dead rotting girls with their eyes ripped out of their heads, liquefied in their skulls, blood crystallized in their veins, mouths gaping and contorted and Neji imagined bloodcurdling shrieks appropriate to the situation because their blood _was_ curdling in their skin. Raiding their crypt for data and DNA, raping a tomb for microtubes and a cooler full of vials, leading three children (one of them related to the dead children inside) like nothing was going on, sitting down while Kabuto interrogated him over the details. Not. Going. Fucking. Nuts. These were the signs of his quiet monstrosity. He should have gone insane but he hadn't because he couldn't and, dementedly, part of him wished he had. Then he'd be human. Human beings went insane when they saw this kind of thing; _he_ just sucked it in and held it like a last breath.

"_I would have killed them all much sooner."_

There was a hissing noise and door to his room slid open.

"Good morning, Neji-kun." Kabuto's voice was a low and lulling hum, delicate as if he knew the young Hyuuga had just come out of a nightmare. "I believe you're in need of a second de-briefing. Get dressed. Orochimaru-sama would like to have a word."

Then the door closed.

"I am so extraordinarily fucked."

_Yes, Neji. Yes, you are. _

- - -

Paraphrasing previous statement: _'I am so extraordinarily, undeniably fucked…'_

It was a dark room, naturally. The Sound seemed to primarily underground and poorly lit as a personal characteristic. The man by the shelves flipped a page idly and the movement seemed to make the whole room shiver. Then with a sigh his host closed the book and placed it on a desk beside an array of different parchments and scrolls. They all seemed to be letters, but written in Sound syntax code and Neji didn't bother trying to read them from afar. The title of the book, however, was 'A History of Five Countries'. There was an origami crane pressed between the pages as a bookmark.

"Hyuuga Neji? You were the one who killed Kidomaru two years ago, coming after Sasuke-kun, correct?"

The Hyuuga nodded. He still didn't sit down. "I did."

"Hmm…and after all that information Kabuto gave him. Out of all the Rookies, you should have been the one they killed without hesitation. Kidomaru was fool."

The young jounin bristled mentally. The slight on Kidomaru stirred unexpected ire. It was probably his logic (he'd reasoned most of it during his subsequent residency as the hospital):

If Kidomaru was an idiot than Neji, by comparison, was dithering moron. The man had deciphered the weakness of the Byakugan in a ten-minute battle, exploited it and turned the tables of their conflict. Ten minutes to figure out what had taken a select few – maybe eight total – geniuses scattered throughout Konoha to figure out in uncounted decades. If Kidomaru had been guilty of anything, it had been blatant sadism and a dash of overconfidence. It just so happened that had been enough to get him killed by a genin.

"He was stronger than me," Neji said warily, not certain how he was expected to answer.

"Maybe." Those strange, animalist eyes peered dauntlessly at him. His expression could have easily been the one he used to inspect a book; neither kind nor malevolent: just…interested. "But _you're_ still alive aren't you?"

"I got lucky."

The man just laughed. "A modest liar," he said lightly, almost elegantly. "Tsunade's tact must be rubbing off on her shinobi."

Neji didn't answer one way or the other. "Why did you pick me over, Hinata-sama?" he asked monotonously, not daring to try his deceptive skills against the Sennin. "You know the nature of the Cage Seal. You were watching at the Chuunin Exams…"

"Naturally," he replied, unfazed. "I was watching very closely. In perfect honesty, I didn't care much for the fight. I've seen better examples of the Hyuuga style. You obviously taught yourself. However, you did do _something_ to catch my interest, Hyuuga-san." He leaned forward, his expression chill and calculated. "I have no need for the weak, no matter what secrets I might glean from them, you see. That's why I chose you. You defied your very name. In front of everyone in blatant insubordination spat on the ideals of your own clan. You nearly killed their heir, I hear. You stole their secrets for yourself. You've spied, assassinated, and you did it because you were told to…but you questioned it all the time. I have use for that, that untapped potential. I have use for you."

"So you kidnapped me?" Neji demanded tightly. "With the full knowledge of everyone? Even the Hokage? My clan?"

The man blinked mildly, leaning back. "I don't recall that I ever hid my intentions with Sasuke."

Neji blinked back.

How did you argue with that?

"Kabuto sent you on your first mission for us," the man commented. "How did you like it?"

Neji fought back the instant-replay urge to vomit. "Not that much, really."

"Ah, then Kabuto made the correct estimations about you. Remarkable insight that boy has, no?" The smile curled like smoke across the snake's face, outlining the wicked glitter in his gaze. "You didn't like it…but you did it anyway. Good little anti-soldier."

"A curse seal is a persuasive motivator," Neji reminded him coldly.

"Very good, Neji. You bring me to the heart of the issue, but first I'd like to tell you something about yourself, a bit of a…personal profile if you will. Bear with me. You're not as innocent as your teammates. You've _done_ things, things they haven't had the chance to touch yet." The man laughed, low and leery and lethal. "If I know Tsunade, like I know I do…she's used you, your lovely useful eyes. Your angry rebellious willingness to defy clan tradition because…branch Hyuuga aren't admitted to ANBU without the head family's say so, isn't that right? So you obey your Hokage with mindless dedication no matter what she tells you to do. So there you are – standing next to those charming friend of yours and thinking about the gaping pit in your gut, eating you like a cancer while they laugh and talk and train –"

"Fuck you," Neji bit out so hard the words burned up the back of his throat.

He tried to ignore the jolt of blind panic, the reactive _'How the fuck did he know –?'_

The invective just made the man laugh a bit more.

Once again he revisited his first thought upon entering the room, the one where he was so thoroughly screwed, to the wall even. He'd been screwed to walls before, but this time he couldn't see himself getting out of it completely intact, if at all. He'd lose good limbs, a couple probably; he'd be particularly fond of at least one. But, surprise, surprise, the migraine was reaching skull-cracking, funny-lights-dancing-about-your-vision levels. Neji blinked twice, hard, clamping back the familiar urgent nausea that came with the sudden excruciating headache. He swallowed back the rising bile and closed his eyes.

The pain ebbed. "I'm not like Uchiha Sasuke," he said finally, coldly. "If I refuse?"

"Do what you like. But I'd like you to answer a couple simple questions before you make any rash decisions, such as that."

Neji made a show of pursing his lips briefly. "Fine."

"Are you loyal to your cousin?" It was asked simply, without presumption.

He answered in kind. "Yes."

"Hmm…And did you really want to save her?"

"Yes."

"Really?" He seemed perplexed. "Why?"

"She's my _cousin_." Said like it meant something.

A breathy chuckle.

…and suddenly a hand settled at the nape of his neck. "_Liar_."

For a moment Neji stared stupidly at the empty air he was directing his attentions to, lips parted slightly on his last words. _'Kage Bunshin.' _The thought was automatic. _'That's why…I couldn't tell.' _He could feel every teacher he ever had groaning in pain. Unconscious heat rose to his skin, heart rate quickening, blood rushing with repressed horror. He could smell the murderer's scent, like old paper and old blood mixed with cut grass. The sensation of the man's hand on his skin was almost too much to bear. But not because it felt strange or corpse-like, but rather because the man's delicate fingers were contrarily warm and human. A man this insane, this horrible, this hideously twisted should somehow convey his evil to the skin…but he didn't.

If Neji hadn't been as sensitive to chakra and biased as hell toward the madman, he might have not even known these girlish white hands had been used to torture and murder and mutilate lives. His own _lack_ of odium to the touch made Neji's sicker than the contact itself. Somehow he felt contaminated, the same feeling he had looking at Hinata on the river as they made the exchange. That same indefinable, reasonless guilt. Hysteria was setting in again. He fought to settle down.

"She told me things," said Orochimaru softly, laughing, amused. "She doesn't remember, but your cousin was very forthcoming under the right pressure. She resisted force surprisingly well, but it did no good against Kabuto's questioning. He's very persuasive when he wants to be."

Every nerve in his body had shut off, channeling all their sensation helpfully to that cool dry contact at his back. The thumb shifted slightly…and suddenly it was completely eclipsed. Gone. He couldn't see it and Neji knew immediately what Hinata had told them. Heat slammed though his head, acrid and illogical and he fought back his instinct to recoil from the feeling of a thumb rubbing casually down the bump of a single particular vertebra. That cloying voice crept into his brain again, in his ear, cooing silently _"I would have killed them all much sooner." _

Byakugan came violently active. Chakra blazed down his arms so urgently the entire room came aglow with the influx of brilliantly aqua-green; the radiance that ignited his hands into deadly ethereal blurs. Neji twisted, torqued his body around in flexibility only Gentle Fist gave a human and tried to blow the man's heart out. This was the Jukken equivalent of firing a shotgun at pointblank range.

Orochimaru didn't miss a beat. With an effortless slap he deflected both his hands, pivoted to the side, a single neat slide – so _hideously_ _fast_ – and with an open-palmed shove he slammed Neji's unguarded forehead into the floor.

The world burst into a kaleidoscope of pain, a mirror falling to the ground in reverse, shattering and scattering and replaying again in brilliant flashes of cold crimson, blue and green that tasted like copper and red curry. With a backward snap, his head rebounded and swift fingers snatched up a knot of his dark hair, twisted it into a handhold. He was yanked back so hard it put his entire body into an unnatural arc.

All the while his entire world crashed in on itself, sucked down into two pinpoint pins of red-hot pain behind his eyes. He almost passed out. Like someone took a staple gun to his optical nerves, repeated shots of agony blitzed through his skull, rending his senses in a blinding, crazily spinning haze of colors and sensations. He nearly puked again, his body desperate to do something, anything to some how get the _pain_ out. Blood dripped in his eyes, hot and corrosive, stinging them even while reflexive tears rinsed it out. They _burned;_ like chemical acids so volatile Neji actually _could not see_ straight. He felt his nose bleeding furiously through the numbness of the blow.

Neji hissed as his head was wrenched back to painful angle.

"That was very stupid," Orochimaru murmured.

For a moment nothing else was said. In agony Neji waited; shaking uncontrollably, entire body prickling with that unstable almost maddening sensation of unprovoked exhaustion the came after such a violent sensory overload. He coiled his hands against the floor, entire body tensing on instinct, anticipating the next brutality. And then a cool palm covered his forehead. Like a parent looking for fever, dry fingers settled against his skin, the precursor to something horrific. _'Oh shit…Oh no.'_

"But stupidity isn't a justified excuse for attacking me, Neji-kun."

A breath, short, hitched, afraid.

"Remember this next time."

Then the genjutsu hit him. And, like any other time, the whole world fractured. The images and sensations hit him with nothing like eloquence or effort like Kurenai might have put into one of her illusions, but brutal and so hideously raw that nothing, no description could suffice. He'd never been burned alive, felt his own skin crackle and split in the heat, fluids boiling in his own body, hissing as he burst into flames, eating him from the outside in. He wasn't sure what it felt like. For all he knew Orochimaru had gotten it all wrong and that's not what it felt like at all. Either way, he didn't have to be artistic to make Neji believe.

Neji jerked out of the genjutsu screaming hysterically, his arms wrapped around his head, his spine curling up off the floor in a long agonized curve and he collapsed, rolling onto his side and twitching intermittently. His hands trembled, his nerves still twitching excess synapses through him, erratic jolts, echoes of the chakra induced nerve stimulation. Every bit of his skin felt cold and blistered, like hoarfrost through his blood and he didn't dare move. Irrationally he reasoned to move might crack the surface of his icy skin and like a diamond struck he'd shatter into a thousand pieces.

Orochimaru was crouched at his back. Training said 'move,' but his body was on strike. Paralyzed with unnamable rigor mortis, he just laid there; panting like a dying dog, eyes wide-open and gazing with terror into nothing. _'Shit! I can't…I can't do that again! If he does that again…'_ Neji shuddered, stomach churning tortuously, like he'd ingested battery acid. He fought back an instinctive twitch as that pale hand pushed hair off his forehead, settling cold – finally cold, not warm – fingertips against the bloodied bandages. _'No…shit. I can't…again._' Orochimaru slid his hand up into Neji's bangs, clenching tightly and pulling the Hyuuga up by his hair.

Dimly he recalled Guy-sensei explain how, if the enemy could put chakra directly into yours, a genjutsu was nearly impossible to break out of.

"Why do you still cling to that weak notion?" the Sennin asked cruelly, soft and intimate. "_Family_?"

"Because it's not weak," he coughed, words bursting from his battered lungs in broken pieces. "It's not weak."

Orochimaru smiled. "From what I can tell, it's not worth much to you here."

"I value it above all things," he rasped, eyes fluttering. _'I do. It's true. I'm not lying. Thank God…' _"Do what…you like with me. They're safe."

He struggled not to pass out. _'Do not pass out! Stay awake, shinobi!'_

– "_blame your clan" –_ The words welled up from behind the walls he'd built, sliding into his head, treacherous and oily. Orochimaru was speaking again, that low, dulcet tone. "The Hyuuga have abandoned you," he said neutrally. Between his words, someone was speaking, softly, coldly. –_"blame your cousins" – _"Forsaken you for that mewling girl Kabuto returned to Konoha."_ – "your uncle"_ _–_ "Even if you love them, boy,"_ – "your family."_ – "they left you to die here."

"_It was they who bred this obedience into you, not I."_

Gently Orochimaru tugged his hair until he could lean into the jounin's ear and murmur. "You have no loyalties."

What Neji did next…he could never explain.

Years of experience taught Neji to read situations. Hatake Kakashi once said half the battle happens while the other guy watches you square up to him. He could tell when an enemy-nin was afraid, when a good verbal slam would have an affect, or when words meant nothing. Instinct and insight – favors of the Byakugan – gave him a psychological edge in any battle. Rock Lee had once confessed the worst thing about fighting Neji was anticipating what kind of horrible, debilitating thing he might say to completely crush your spirit. He knew when to say things. He knew when to be silent. He knew. He shouldn't have said anything, should have just kept his damn mouth _shut_.

And he didn't.

"What would a traitor know of loyalties?" he whispered.

Orochimaru's fingers slammed through his forehead. Like four metal rods they pierced the bandages and caved front of his skull in. The force drove shards of white bone deep into the ruined jelly of his eyes and horribly he was alive, still breathing while those cold fingers dug through his head. He tasted something liquid and salty on the back of tongue and realized with horror it was his own brain fluid dripping into the back of his mouth. All the while those hands were sorting through the clay-like mush, clawing out the chucks of little interest and letting them splatter on the floor. Fingernails scraped the inside of his skull, shredding delicate webs of blood vessels, ripping the membranous inner layers like wet rice paper against the rough cracks in an ivory bowl –

Neji came out of the genjutsu screaming again, one long loud, unbroken (muffled?) sound, cut off violently as he was cut free. At some point during his hypnosis he'd thrashed and writhed his way into a slump on the floor, curled like a child and shaking uncontrollably from head to foot. He had one hand tangled in his hair, clawed, fingernails digging into his scalp like he'd tried to claw the insanity out of his own skull. His other hand he'd shoved illogically in his mouth, wrapped it around the lower half of his face and sank his teeth into the flesh between the thumb and forefinger. Dimly he realized he must have done it to silence himself, one of the torture training techniques they'd taught him.

The salty saline flavor of cerebrospinal liquid still lingered on his tongue like a bad after-taste, smelling things he shouldn't be since his nose was filled with blood. The same blood tasted hot and salty, metallic on his tongue as he slid his hand from his mouth, glistening with red and saliva. His mouth felt strange, the skin around his lips and nose prickling, pins and needles. Pressure was building up, rising up behind his eyes. Flash photos, conditioned reactions, muscle memory, a hundred synaptic commands demanding, demanding, ordering something…some kind of action…

Orochimaru dropped into another crouch next to him. "I don't let subordinates speak out of turn, Neji-kun."

Fury shot through him. "I'm not your subordinate!"

Neji spun, lunging at the man like a stricken cat, hurt, instinctive. He attacked with barely controlled Jukken, completely without restraint, chakra burning all down his arms into his hands. He tackled the Sennin bodily. He didn't know why. His reasoning had ceased to function. But despite his momentum, the crazed speed borne of Hyuuga genetics, training, and excellence, the man caught him just like a child; seizing his arms easily and restraining him. He struggled; like that same child wrists trapped jerking and wrenching uselessly in an adult's indomitable grip. Desperation made him wild, pain made him erratic, both made him stupid and he just stood there, twisting and thrashing pathetically while Orochimaru watched him.

The genjutsu torture had leeched away Neji's energy to the dregs. He wasn't Naruto; he didn't have endless amounts of chakra to draw upon in a crisis, he only had what he had and he didn't have enough. He just…didn't. Those inhuman eyes had him pinned, contemptuous, completely in control, control over him and Neji couldn't find it inside him to defy it. Nothing but his own terror, aching lonely desperation and it just wasn't enough. He needed…he needed – _"Love and hatred are the most powerful emotions." _

Something sparked inside his chest, raced out from his centre like an electric jolt along his chakra pathways and suddenly the familiar, painful urgency returned. The over flow, the need, the climbing that strove for the peak: the climax and resolution, release. The pressure, the build up of it, the knowing, not knowing, something…like fever breaking and rationality was returning, beautiful, excruciating sanity. He couldn't even say. Descriptions were failing again. There was just the sudden, maddening tension inside every inch of his body and he couldn't unwind, couldn't get out, couldn't…

Twin embers ignited behind his eyes, every trace of chakra in every pathway reversing like water through a vacuum and rushing up, through his and pooling like arsenic, boiling, burning, inside the optic nerve, hardwiring power into his Byakugan. He stopped struggling and lifted his head to look his captor in the face, the double lens system constricting the sinew around his eyes, pressurizing, permeating every particle of thought. The world blitzed briefly, his vision careening wildly – _"Lesson three: 'loyalty' is just a word." _**– **and twin firecrackers exploded in his skull. Chakra ripped free from his eyes like a shockwave through water, whirling, rippling –

Orochimaru backhanded him to the floor.

Fire burst behind his head and the world was crazily spinning down and up and suddenly everything was blurring slurry of color and black. Slowly the merry-go-round settled, slowed and the world came back into focus. Breath suddenly failed to come**. **He was on the floor, clutching his head, shuddering like a man in a seizure, trying to cover eyes that were being _torn out of his skull!_ and in too much agony to actually touch them. _'It…_hurts_. So much, it still hurts.'_ He curled up, fighting the dark corners closing in on him.

"Why?" Sweat dripped into his hair, down, splattering darkly on the floor. "I don't…understand. Why…why didn't it…" He cut himself off as the Sennin crouched beside him, kneeling down by his head.

"Well, well." Orochimaru murmured; voice soothing, like one speaks to a child. "That _is_ a dangerous trick. Kabuto mentioned it. Strange. Where did you learn something so perilous, brat?"

Neji couldn't even twitch away when chalky fingers trailed to his cheek, turning his head to look him in the face. The intimate touch set his every survival instinct on its bleeding edge, but the pain dominated everything, even his instincts. A stray finger led a cool palm to his face, dousing some of the lingering heat still eating up the inside of his skull, stabilizing, calming the corrosive forces roiling inside his head until the sensation faded into dull throbbing, then a low background hum behind his retina. Slowly, slowly he managed to ease his eyes open, blinking in the sudden blinding light of the dying candles.

Those horrid serpent green eyes held his gaze in limbo. "Such wild hatred. I'll hazard you didn't learn that from a Hyuuga, did you?"

"Where I learn my techniques," Neji panted, "is none of your concern."

He laughed, delighted – apparently – with his captive's defiance. "I'll make this transition easy on you, Hyuuga, and explain it," said the man evenly. "You did that last mission because you chose to. The Serpent Seal had nothing to do with it, Neji-kun. Like your Cage Seal, it's a mere formality, a physical manifestation of what really keeps you bound and that's simple instinct. You want for a purpose, Hyuuga. First it was to be clan genius, then it was to be an excellent jounin. You turn this way and that seeking approval and you'll offer yourself up to any passing thing that provides you that purpose – the new flavor of the week is that Hinata girl. Protecting her is a transient phase you're experiencing, give it a year and you'll find something better to occupy yourself with."

"Hinata," Neji shouted half-brokenly, "is not a '_hobby'_ I picked up! You know _nothing_ about me. _Nothing_ about her. _Nothing_."

"I'm afraid I'm not wrong, Hyuuga. You'll come to see this soon enough," said the former Sennin dismissively, hearing nothing of Neji's promises. "Your talents belonged to Hidden Leaf; they now belong to the Sound. Your new purpose will be for the benefit of the Sound and by the end of all this, you'll realize you've always preferred things this way."

Orochimaru turned away, gliding back to his bookshelves and picking up a calligraphy brush from the table top. From behind, he looked human again, almost mundane as he wrote the characters with deft grace and confidence_. "I'll hazard you didn't learn that from a Hyuuga, did you?"_

_**Author's Note:**_

_Well, it's been an abysmally long time and I have no excuses save academic overload and serious lack of sadistic writing moods. Let's face it, this fic is only fun when I'm tormenting the living hell out of Neji. Also, writing Orochimaru is hard as heck and frankly you've gotta really think creepy to get anything close to right. I don't know if I did. But this is my first extended Orochimaru dialogue scene so I hoped you enjoyed it…the few people still reading. You are bomb and deserve cookies. _


	12. Scotomaphobia

**Scotomaphobia**

* * *

_: fear of going blind in a visual field_

* * *

As a child and into his teenaged years, Hyuuga Neji had been prone to migraines. These were the things he did to relieve them: warm compress, dark room, not moving, breathing through your mouth…none of which are readily available to a newly minted jounin on assignment. Which is to say, basically, that he did none of these things. In those times it's hard to function, to run in sync, to flow, to be flawless and fluid like he needs to live the life of a shinobi. In those times, thoughts come in feverish bursts of coherency, striking like dangerous children in the dark, running out of the carnival colors, spinning like tops behind his eyes, dressed in flashing reds and blues.

Thoughts hit at random; laughing assassins from the corners of his aching mind and with them comes the maddening question: _Why? Why won't it stop?_ Demanding it softly to himself, a muffled shout, gritting it out silently while his teammates pretended they didn't notice him turning unbecoming shades of green. Pain without a source or a reason, without visible cause or motivation. It's the worse kind, the maddening kind, because you can't touch it, clutch it to you, staunch the flow or bind the sprain. There's just the after affect eating its way through your core, the untouchable pain. In those times, it's a fragile existence.

This was one of those times.

The fact his eyes were burning their way out of his skull didn't help much either.

He'd barely made his way out of Orochimaru's chambers before collapsing, puking helplessly in the hall outside. For fear or pain or guilt or all of the above, he couldn't tell. Deep in the dark recesses where jounin level logic ruled, he knew that he should be processing his conversation with Orochimaru, piecing the puzzle together, counter-reasoning his _bloody God-awful_ arguments. Anything, but just then all his thinking machinations were gummed thoroughly by the screaming, mind-shattering fire inside his head. There was a Chinese New Year thousand pack fire-bomb going off in his optic nerve. He could barely walk. His brain was swelling in his skull. Worst of all –_ 'Calm down. Shit! Just – you're fine, just…' _– he couldn't see.

Again the not-so-illogical dread jammed itself in the back of his throat, knotting his voice up in an impassible blockage. '_What if I go blind?'_ He tried to synchronize his breathing again, difficult as it developed a habit of hitching in the back of his throat. Still he tried. Just breathing, to lead himself through mediation like he had so many times before, but peace refused to come. The one conclusion to any train of thought was the careening crash down into _'What if I _do_ go blind?' _

"Easy," Kabuto's voice intruded gently on the panicked static of his thoughts, penetrating the wall of pain and darkness. "Easy, Neji. It's the genjutsu conflicting with your Byakugan, relax." A chill hand touched his temple and a burst of cool chakra spread across his face, smothering some of the gunpowder explosions tearing through his brain. Healing jutsu: dispersing the lingering effects, erasing the forced synaptic links in his head, like someone was unknotting a garroting wire in his brain. "Just breathe, Neji. It's okay." Cognition returned in inches, slowly, the furnace of his unnamed jutsu dying down to embers in his blood. He was breathing now, shivering – _pathetic_! – with relief.

"Can you walk?"

Neji didn't reply.

"You can either walk or I'll carry you."

He swallowed – throat, mouth burning with bile, stomach acid, unspoken screams – and forced himself to his feet. Kabuto murmured something and took Neji's wrist; after a frightening moment where the Hyuuga couldn't figure out what his guide was doing, the doctor placed Neji's hand on his shoulder. Kabuto didn't say anything, just started walking and Neji followed his hand after him, concentrating on not, not, not collapsing on the floor and knocking himself unconscious. As a result he couldn't have said for sure how long they walked. His reality was one that revolved in his vision, seeing was his primary sensation of the five and he'd just been plunged into deep, sarcophagus black. Breathe, just breathe.

His hand was shrugged off suddenly and Neji stopped, freezing. His world for a stark moment shrank to the bland, agonizing blackness that had suddenly enveloped the Hyuuga's existence. Neji swallowed. Darkness wasn't something Hyuuga grew up fearing. Children who see everything can't be frightened of monsters and imps in the closet. Now suddenly, at the ripe age of sixteen he was developing a hard core case of nyctophobia? This is unacceptable, shinobi. Get your shit together.

His hip bumped slightly against the corner of a table and he slid his hand across the edge, fingers bumping blindly against the lip of the stone counter. In accordance with Neji's rotten karma, his seeking hands slid across something cold and _fleshy_. He jerked his fingers back with a half-muffled hiss and only then did the stale, vaguely putrid scent assault him, crashing against his olfactory senses in a collage of nauseating odors. Dead flesh. Peroxide.

The thing he touched was a cadaver.

Kabuto chuckled.

"This isn't the infirmary. Some of the tables are…occupied." A gloved hand tapped his arm. "Over here, Neji-kun."

Hands, cold, slightly damp, settled on his shoulders, pulling him around to sit on the edge of a low table about seven feet to the left of the other one. The hands felt too big through his shirt against his skin, like they belonged to someone older, stronger, not an enemy Sound ninja. For an ugly moment of random comparison, his mind thought of his father when he was three, placing wide, calloused hands on his little shoulders, heavy and powerful while he smiled into his son's face. Neji tore himself out of the traitorous memory, disgusted with himself and ground his clenched fingers into the grainy stone beneath him.

The muggy air tasted like tap water and dirt after rainfall and he could taste the smell of the Sound. He knew it smelled like freshly tilled fields, gardens after spring showers, heavy with the tang of clay and decomposing human skin. Even the strange organic scent of his guide – the peculiar sweetness of sterilizer fluid mixed with a grainy yeast smell, some indescribable human odor. He covered his nose with his hand, praying his wouldn't accidentally breathe through his nose again as even the smell of this place set his already throbbing head reeling.

Kabuto had withdrawn.

Neji could hear the squeak of a something being twisted then the hollow, liquid roar as water thundered into the bottom of a basin.

"If you need to throw up, there's a bowl on the end of the table," Kabuto's voice said, sounding fainter from the other side of the room. "Genjutsu has that affect. It should fade in a couple hours." Footfalls marked the man's position, moving around the room with noise unbecoming of a shinobi. "You're lucky; Orochimaru's techniques usually leave ninja incapacitated for hours on end."

Neji breathed a little harder, through his mouth still. White-hot fireworks lit up the dark in his head. Just the mention of vomiting made him suddenly twice as queasy as before. He covered his mouth again and tried not breathing for a second; imagining he could taste the cold, dead air. He needed to throw up _now_.

He swore to kill Kabuto a couple more times.

He felt another person drawing close and quite suddenly a warm cloth lay against his aching forehead, runnels of water siding through his damp hair, finding tracks down the nape of his neck into the collar of his shirt. Neji held it there automatically, too startled to be repulsed by the medical attentions of the unpleasant Sound-nin. Kabuto took the opportunity to steal his free arm and find his pulse – slow and shallow – in the vein beneath his wrist. After a moment he made a soft sound and let go, reaching this time for Neji's face. The teen sensed the intent and recoiled immediately.

"What?" he hissed.

"I need to see your eyes, Neji-kun," said Kabuto softly.

"I can't open my eyes," the Hyuuga said coldly, caustically. "I'm fine."

"So you can't see, but you're just fine. Yes. I'm certain your medical expertise is why you made jounin. Just relax; I'm not going to hurt you."

Neji slapped an unseen hand, sensing it encroaching on his face. "Don't _touch_ me."

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to."

"Why?" Neji hissed finally. "My eyes aren't important. Or have you forgotten it's Sasuke Orochimaru is truly interested in?"

Kabuto made a soft huff, as if exasperated. "You're a genius, Neji-kun. _Think_. If Orochimaru-sama didn't have interest in you, or your eyes, you'd be dead. Not many people would protest such an arrangement." Neji felt him move slightly, as if mulling this over. "Besides, if you _do_ go blind we really _would_ have no use for you, Hyuuga-san. I'd be obligated to uphold tradition. What's the saying? 'There are no blind Hyuuga?'"

There was a moment of tense black; Neji's whole awareness hyper-extended, quivering like a web of vaporous barriers all around him. He would have loved an excuse, any excuse to refuse to cooperate as it went against his moral code, shinobi code, generally any codes he could think of…mostly cooperating just went against his nature. But such freedoms weren't his to pick and choose. He half way suspected resistance would get him a shot of something normal sixteen-year-olds shouldn't have in their system and he didn't want to be inebriated in any way around a freak like Kabuto.

Thus, he forced himself to hold still and _not use Juuken!_ while Kabuto slowly guided his hand away, removing the warm rag and instructing him monotonously to relax. Already his eyes seemed to sear all the more intensely, anticipating the pain of the examination. Trembling from head to foot, Neji managed something like calm even as those uncomfortably cold hands ghosted slowly, almost gingerly across the still sticky skin of his forehead. A cloth had diluted the blood dried across his brow; Neji could feel it sliding down his face in ruddy beads, tickling his temple maddeningly.

Quick thumbs wiped the droplets away and settled symmetrically at the corners of either eye, hands slightly scratchy against his cheeks as the med-nin tilted his head up. Neji swallowed, biting back the urge to put a fist in the man's gut. He tried to think about something else, something that wouldn't get him killed executioner style by the Sound shinobi's psychotic physician. A couple of fingertips brushed his eyes lids gently.

"Does that hurt?"

"A little."

"Hmm…" He could sense Kabuto frowning. "Would bright light be painful for you?"

Neji nodded slightly. Kabuto's hands vanished and Neji could feel him move away to some unseen light source and dim it. He returned a moment later and settled on hand beneath his chin, the other across his forehead like a shield.

"Try now. Take it slow."

Neij swallowed and – going against every well-meaning self-preservation instinct in his body – tried to open his eyes. Instantly the burning pain returned, zipping up out the back of his abused optical nerves into his brain stem where it proceeded to kick him in the back of the head screaming 'What are you doing, you idiot!' Neji flinched and clenched them shut again. After a breath he tried once more, focusing on ignoring the sensation of dragging sandpaper across the surface of his cornea. It was almost impossible. Like someone had weighed his eyelids with lead and he couldn't even squint, much less see.

'_I don't remember it hurting this much last time,'_ he thought furiously, forced to close his eyes a second time. _'And I had more chakra left. I know it did. Why did I waste so much this time? Why didn't it work?'_ His slue of questions met a big ambiguous wall of silence in the back of his mind, blinking blandly back at him in perfect mystery: 'I dunno'. Quietly he worked through a long list of expletives while he attempted for what felt like the hundredth time to get his eyes open again. This time, using every particle of focus he possessed, he managed to get a look at the blurred, dimly lit face of his unofficial caretaker.

The floating circles of reflective glass light served to hide his eyes, though Neji saw his mouth slip open just slightly in a faint 'O' at whatever he made out in the flutter of eyelids. Neji just sat up again and, biting the inside of his cheek, forced his eyes to open again wide as he could, ignoring the tears that immediately overflowed the corners of his eyes and ran freely down his face. He choked on a breath, gritting his teeth, waiting for some kind of signal that he could close them again. Then Kabuto caught his chin suddenly, lifting his head into the dim light and inviting a bombardment of scorching heat all across the interior of his eye sockets.

"_Ah_!" Neji jerked free, eyes slamming shut instantly. He turned his face out of the light.

"Thank you, Neji-kun. That's all I needed," Kabuto said politely.

"And you needed _what_ exactly?"

"To see the extent of the damage. Seems relatively mild, given the violence of such a technique." A thoughtful sound. "No. I don't think you'll be okay like this."

Then Kabuto's fingers settled on the juin seal across his forehead and that same icy alien chakra spread across his face. It swept through his system like morphine, spreading through him, invading and so intensely powerful Neji's entire body seized up. His spine arced slightly, a cry of protest aborted prematurely on the back of his tongue. ("_Relax_," Kabuto was saying gently, placing both hands comfortably on either side of Neji's head.) He was channeling a freezing circuit of foreign chakra through his skull, intense, focusing waves of medical ninjutsu that both burned and soothed, jolting through the higher centers of his brain and sending wild, disjointed sensations of synthetic memory through his nervous system.

He can smell perfume and cooking mochi. Someone has their hands against his stomach. There is pressure against his face and thighs. His fingers tingle. His toes curl. He can taste talcum powder and metal and celery. There is a faint ringing noise in his ear, buzzing into his temporal lobe and humming there like a chord. He's aware of Kabuto's chakra in his spine, paralyzing him with expert technique and holding him there in sensory suspension. (_"I'm not hurting you. It feels strange because of the curse seal. I have to work around it. Just bear with me."_) He is trapped. His head is full of ice and electricity. He is being taken over. It feels _good_. He is laughing. Crying. It _hurts_. He is falling –

"It doesn't seem to have worsened from your last use."

"…" Neji said, frozen with the after-shock.

He could see now. The pain was an ache now. He could not for the _life_ of him be sure that just happened...but his confused nervous system was telling him otherwise. His palms were damp.

Kabuto was wiping his hands off on a damp rag nearby. "Though you have a significantly lower chakra level this time. I presume your eyes are simply unused to this kind of strain. They're trying to adjust, but it's painful. As it is, I believed you've, ah, sprained your Byakugan, for a lack of a better term. A technique like that needs to be carefully practiced, not attempted in blind moments of panic, I'm afraid. " Neji felt those objective hazel eyes tracking the signals in his face, searching. "It's difficult to say at such an early stage, but one of two things will happen: your eyes will either adjust to the new chakra fluctuations…or you'll burn out your retinas through your optic nerve, blinding yourself in the process."

Neji didn't say anything.

"What's the matter? You're pale."

Again, he didn't say anything.

"Oh." His tone became gentle, all together apologetic even. "It completely slipped my mind – putting my chakra into your system like that – that's _horrendously_ rude among Hyuuga isn't it? My apologies. Social faux pas. I wasn't trying to be offensive, it was just medical instinct. I was wiping out the lingering synaptic trails left by the genjutsu." Neji let go the breath he'd been holding and ignored (_the shaky stir in his belly or the sick heat the medic's chakra had left behind or the way his breathing had gone shallow – the familiar dread_) the discourtesy. The Sound-nin smiled over his shoulder, vaguely friendly. "You're surprisingly vulnerable, Neji-kun."

"I guess I'm out of practice," he rejoined.

"You know…" Kabuto remarked ponderously, tilting his aluminum colored head, "that jutsu of yours. I'm no expert, but I'm certain Hyuuga doujutsu doesn't work like that. Furthermore, even if you _are_ gifted with a blood-line's special abilities, a technique like that one would take _months_ of intensive training and mentoring. It's not a Hyuuga technique. Hinata already told me you quit Juuken training with Hiashi-dono." The medic made a low, throat-deep sound of intrigue. "Now isn't that odd? Your Juuken form is poor as ever and yet you turn down the Hyuuga head's personal mentoring? How arrogant of you."

Neji kept his tone crisp. "Hinata-sama?"

"Oh yes. I spoke with her for a couple days." He smiled amorously. "She's a sweet girl. But you're being evasive. Tell me, why did you quit training with your esteemed uncle? I thought that was the very height of branch family honor, to be respected by the Hyuuga head?"

"Why would you care, Yakushi?"

"Curiosity." There was an insincere smile in his voice. "It's my personal curse and I've always found the Hyuuga blood-line to be of a particularly fascinating breed. Brothers and sisters living in perpetual terror of one another?" The physician chuckled and for once it sounded genuine. "So are you going to tell me or make me guess?" When Neji didn't offer any hints, the young physician shrugged and went on easily, "There's really only one reason I can think of and that's personal choice, Neji-kun. You spend all that time jealous of your place outside their teachings only to find that prefer your own methods to the purity of the main family's. Very strange, Neji-kun. You're a mystery all your own, aren't you?"

The addressed Hyuuga didn't say anything.

"Hinata told me something strange," Kabuto continued, unfazed. "She said you don't scream when your Cage Seal is activated. Why is that Neji-kun?"

"She didn't tell you any such thing."

"Oh no?"

"No."

"Because she's too strong for that?" A smile. "You're smarter than that Neji. Be realistic."

"She wouldn't–"

"She told Orochimaru about the blind spot."

"Not," Neji snapped, "about _me_."

There was an incremental pause.

"She told me the Cage Seal can be removed."

Talcum eyes narrowed. "You're lying."

"You're the best lie detector in Konoha, I'm sure. Do I look like I'm lying?"

"You're lying because I already know what you're saying is a lie."

"You're right," confessed Kabuto, dismissive, voice never once waving an iota from pleasant. "She never said that. She told me that one of her aunts wants to fuck you." The med-nin could have been commenting on the _weather_. His expression was inquisitive. "Tell me; are all the rumors of rape in the branch family true? Or does the head family have another word for it?"

Neji's stomach clinched instinctively, a corrosive rage welling up the back of his throat and settling there behind his teeth like a demon. But behind the instinctive, reactive, bone-deep fury there was something worse…there was _uncertainty_. (Because there weren't rumors, because no branch member dared speak about it, so how did he…?) Kabuto was standing close now, looking at him. His expression was a mixture of patient interest and polite curiosity, no intentions of murder or attack, just the eyes, watching, searching him. That anyone was paying this much attention to every detail of what he was presently, previously or in the near future was unnerving and – _infuriatingly_ – confusing. Little as he liked it, he couldn't figure out the med-nin's game.

It was too…arbitrary.

The physician tossed him a bottle, Neji plucking it instinctively from the air.

"Take two of these before you go to sleep tonight," he instructed him curtly, once again a doctor. "Get something to eat before you do or it'll burn hole in your stomach. Not really, but you know what I mean."

Neji inspected the bottle. "These are psychotropic drugs."

Again, the doctor's eyes were hidden behind twin glares of light. "I've been monitoring you for a while now, Neji. Like it or not, that's long enough for any doctor to draw some conclusions. From what I can gather, someone worked you over with an extensive genjutsu. Brutal too. Your stress hormone levels are off the charts for a shinobi, blood pressure's way above normal. Then there's the imbalance of norepinephrine, and cortisol. The chemicals in your head are so grossly out of sync; you _should_ be insane, from a purely clinical point of view."

Neji rolled the bottle between his palms, thoughtful. "You think I'm unstable."

"I think I'm qualified to prescribe you something to temper the inevitable break."

"Maybe if your mad excuse for a leader didn't try to mind fuck his prisoners, that wouldn't happen."

Kabuto's laughter had a smoky, insubstantial quality to it, the kind that said he could have just as easily slit his throat for the same words. "I'm not talking about that, Hyuuga-san. Orochimaru-sama may have used a couple unpleasant illusions on you, but that kind of damage is temporary at best, running only as deep as your neuromuscular memory. No, Neji-kun, I'm talking about the deep, deep parietal scarring I found through out your brain. It's artfully done, actually, in such a way that I'm almost certain you don't remember most of what happened. The damage is centered mostly in the sensory memory sectors, so I suppose you've got a vague, instinctive impression of what happened, but no cognitive recognition." He felt Kabuto smiling sympathetically, adjusting his glasses again. "In short, someone's been screwing with your head, Neji-kun."

Neji's face was a picture of skepticism. "Really."

"I'm just telling you what the medical evidence is indicating. Nothing more. Someone crashed your brain with genjutsu. I'm just trying to conclude whether or not this damage is what's resulted in your unusual doujutsu, or if that ability has always been there and the synaptic scarring is a separate affliction." He smiled cannily at the younger shinobi. "It'll be quite a thing, studying a Hyuuga."

"I'm thrilled for you."

"I said it before, the Hyuuga are a fascinating breed. The whole nature of your genetic structure, actually, it's quite intriguing. In fact, while I spent my time in Konoha one of my pet projects was an investigation into the clan medical records, history, etcetera, etcetera. And," he chuckled a bit, "you know what's _truly_ remarkable about the Hyuuga? It's not your power as a clan, really, because the Hyuuga are so few. It's the genetic purity, rather. Even in simple bone structure, you can see the strength of blood. _Your_ features, for example, are noticeably more delicate than that of your usual Hyuuga." His gaze lingered with clinical interest on Neji, tracing the lines of his face with his eyes. "Your cousin, by contrast, is actually a very fine example of Hyuuga breeding. Hinata-chan has perfect zygomatic arches. Yours are slightly elongated… imperceptibly, of course, but imperfect." He grew thoughtful. "I can almost see why they would prefer her. She is genetic perfection. You're just hybrid vigor."

"Hybrid vigor?" Neji repeated coldly. "You seem to think that should mean something to me."

Kabuto looked at him, searching for something. "Has anyone ever told you you look exactly like Uchiha Shisui when he was your age?"

And, quite frankly, Neji just stared – eyes opaque lavender-white and utterly transparent before the physician's voracious gaze.

Kabuto smiled. "We'll continue this conversation later. Mai is waiting for you in the jounin room."

_- - -_

"Wow." Takon didn't even move from his armchair. "You look like shit, Hyuuga."

Mai just licked the last of sesame oil from her finger tips – left over from her dumplings – and observed, "The snake-freak fucked you up proper then, didn't he?"

The room was otherwise unoccupied. Contrary to Kabuto's warning, Mai was not alone and Neji couldn't quite decide whether he preferred it that way or not – because there were phantoms in that woman's eyes, deep, scarred and raging like over eager hyenas – because Takon wasn't much a of safeguard against anything at all. As for the observation on his appearance, the young Hyuuga prodigy was willing to agree that he probably would have looked better if Lee had hit him in the face with a full-on Primary Lotus (okay, not really, but he felt pretty awful) and if the way Mai and Takon kept dividing themselves into two were any indication, his Byakugan was acting up and he could looked forward to soul-crippling migraines from hell for the next few days.

Mai was no longer in the uniform of a Sound-nin but wearing her own set of civilian's clothes, a very fashionable Stone Country style kimono that hung low on her small, glowing pale shoulders. Even in the dim track lights overhead her skin was smooth and ripe, shining on the gloss of her lips, parted just slightly in a moue of disgust and elegant contempt. She looked unassumingly beautiful. Her arms were still bound up in canvas tape to the elbows though and the unabashed hatred remained still in the back of her eyes like a pair of toxic light bulbs behind her irises. That she would have gladly skinned him alive and screaming was manifestly clear. Takon – in lazy disparity – was in his usual black sweater and cut-offs, looking vaguely sleepy and bored.

"So," he said, eyeing Neji over the fist he'd propped his chin on. "I can see that you've got next to no chakra left. Kabuto is being unnecessarily cruel, I think, making us do this when you just got done with the mind-flay, but I'm not the boss."

"His chakra isn't required for this," Mai reminded him, enunciating carefully, pleasurably. "Come here, Hyuuga."

Neji remained standing in the door way.

The corner of her mouth tweaked up. "Yes. That's it. Disobey so I have a reason to hurt you. Come here. I won't ask again."

Neji, though he didn't doubt her threat, waited a good long second or two before moving into the room. Mai stood up and crossed the floor to meet him halfway, taking his wrists without ceremony and bringing his hands up clasped in hers. She held him still, inspecting his face with ease and frank audacity that Neji found dangerous for a woman who hated Hyuuga. The loathing was a living, breathing thing under her skin, quivering inside her fingers where she touched him. He felt the killing intent wishing to manifest, her heart beating faster, excitedly through the palms of her hands and how her chakra raced eagerly to the tenketsu points in her fingertips, leaving cinnamon hot spots of heat on his wrists even after she'd let him go.

"You're just a kid," she told him, as though he might not have known.

"Yes," he said, vaguely sarcastic.

"How old are you?"

"Eighteen."

"Liar. You're sixteen. Kabuto gave me your files. Now be a good boy and don't fight me or I'll put my thumb through one of your pretty eyes, 'kay?"

She pushed him a little too gently into a sitting position on one of the armchairs, placing her lovely lily-white hands on his shoulders, moving them gingerly to the slope of his neck, her palms on his collarbones. Again, he felt her hatred like a barely constrained monster beneath her skin, straining to get out through her palms and sink needle points into the warm pulse of his jugular. Her eyes darted unnaturally eager, hyper-active over his face as she settled in a crouch before him, lips parted slightly as she murmured nonsense thoughts to herself, soundless little movements of the mouth. There was a trace of madness in her gaze, festering there like an ill-tempered ember and waiting to ignite and devour this woman whole.

"Pulse elevated," Mai murmured. "Can't tell if the pupils are contracted, but your body temperature is too low. It'll come back up in a couple hours and in the meantime, if you can't smell anything or feel unnaturally pissed off, that's normal."

"I'm surprised you can walk," commented Takon from his languid position across the room. Those intensely blue eyes flicked to him, staring through snowy bangs. "You must be some kind of masochist."

"No," said Mai a little curtly. She pressed a thumb to his forehead, directly in the middle of his Cage Seal and smiled at him. "This little baby trains you to be tough, doesn't it?"

Neji twitched his face away from the offending finger and favored her with a cool look that explained how he'd break that finger if it ventured near him again. She ignored the look went on with her examination. She briefly framed his face with her hands and studied the shape of his eyes and mouth in intense and illogical urgency. Her touches were clearly intended as clinical – Kabuto had done much of the same just minutes before – but she was lingering too long, fingers straying where there was no pulse to check, eyes moving unnecessarily over his Cage Seal.

She had him close his eyes, then open them, then activate his Byakugan, running soft fingers along the gentle bumps of raised chakra veins. Actually, that was a first. He'd never had someone touch his face while the Byakugan was activated and discovered somewhat irritably that a flow of chakra running just beneath the skin made the area around his eyes sensitive as hell. He flinched when she touched him.

Mai's expression did not indicate one way or the other how her thoughts were clicking together behind her too-soft blue eyes. Apparently she determined him healthy enough for whatever she was about to do because she let him deactivate and leaned down to his eye-level, face very near his.

"Okay," she said, voice somewhat softer than he remembered it being moments before. "We're going to play a little game, Hyuuga. I'm going to ask you a couple questions and you're going to answer. If I like your answer, I'll make you feel good. If I don't like your answer, I'll hurt you." She spoke to him like a primary school teacher might talk to a student in her classroom, a maternal mixture of affectionate and just a little stern. "Now, do you understand the rules, Hyuuga-kun? I want to be perfectly clear."

"What kind of questions are you asking?"

"Well, there are a couple things I want you to tell me," she explained readily, her voice exemplifying what honeyed comfort should be. Her fingers traced a line to his chin and tipped it up. "Tell me something about Konoha, first off, then something about the Hyuuga. After that, we'll see how you feel and go from there."

"You're torturing me then," Neji clarified.

"Only if you want me to." She smiled a little and that smile was a horror in and off itself, some terrible expressive paradox because the emotion he was reading in the back of her eyes and in the stance of her body and the pressure of her fingers brooked no smiles, just eager, unfiltered brutality.She crouched a little in front of him, to get comfortable, and met his eyes steady with her crepe-paper sanity. "So, what do you want to tell me about Konoha?"

Neji thought about it. Then, in a tone of great indifference, told her something about Konoha:

"It was founded over eighty years ago by the Shokage of the Senju Clan during the First Secret War, during which all clans of the shinobi moved to nationalize their respective countries according to their regional and marital similarities. In the central region, later to be called the Fire Country, the two major contesting clans were the Uchiha of the Sharingan and the Senju of the tree element. The Hyuuga were no longer a factor in their power struggle. During an earlier conflict with three allied clans of the Wind, the Hyuuga were decimated – though it should be noted two of the three Wind clans were obliterated unto extinction. The threat of extermination forced the clan elders to seek an alliance with the Senju, pitting genetic relatives against one another –"

Mai slapped him.

Takon snorted. He was reading another manga, one leg propped across his knee. "I thought you were going to let him go on forever."

"Go on," said Mai, while Neji blinked the stars away. "Do that again. I enjoy bruising that pretty face."

"You're failing interrogation basics," the Hyuuga pointed out. "You're leaving your question too open-ended. If I'm an idiot, then I'll get confused, then panic and you'll get nothing but disjointed blather. If I'm clever you'll get the same, but you'll never know it. If you want to know something, you'll have to be more specific."

She slapped him again.

"Mai," called Takon lazily, "the boy has just been mind-fucked. Would you mind not hitting him in the head so much?"

Mai swung around, eyes flashing meanly. "Would you please not contradict me in front of the prisoner, Takon-kun?"

"Why?" inquired the other Sound ninja curiously. "Are we sending mixed messages? Is that bad?" He looked toward Neji. "I'm not confusing you, am I? She wants to torture you, I think she's doing it wrong – you confused yet?"

"You've ruined it now," snapped Mai bitterly.

"Ruined what? The history lesson? He's numb, Mai. You can't torture someone who's just come out of a bout with the snake-freak. Anything you give him will be duckies and daisies in comparison."

"Well, then what do you suggest we do with him?" exclaimed Mai, throwing up her hands I exasperation. "This was pretty much what I was planning to do with my afternoon. Don't you tell me he's getting off with nothing because you know exactly how I feel about that, Takon."

The other jounin sighed and put his graphic novel aside. "Fine. I'll show you. Stupid girl."

And then – faster than Neji's eyes could follow – Takon flickered and slammed Neji backward into the dilapidated armchair, seizing the smaller shinobi with the same vicious motion one might seize a steering wheel. Adamantine fingers crimped his shoulders so hard he could feel the blood vessels bursting into bruises under his skin.. The Sound shinobi towered over him. Compliancy had gone from him like a cheap Noh mask, ripped off and the persona beneath was hideous and raw. A horrific clash of unfettered insanity and something so dark it didn't have a name.

"Tell me how far you're willing to go to protect your country," said the Sound-nin.

Neji was aware of blood thrumming through his head, the surge of motion creating a pressure of heat inside the furnace of his skull. Takon had him pressed back into the molding cushion, one knee jammed against Neji's at such an angle it was pinning his leg against the arm rest, forcing his knees apart. His eyes were all-consuming monsters of forget-you-forever blue.

"Tell me how much you're willing to give to keep their secrets."

The raw, un-tempered frankness of his menace paralyzed him with its purity. There was no space between them, just a humming undercurrent of white-hot potential energy. Like another inch of contact would trigger some great, unstoppable tidal wave and Neji would be utterly obliterated by its happening. Hyuuga eyes read the wordless paragraphs in body language, threatening him with every horror, every unspeakable crime, every hideous, brutal act, anything and everything one could do to another human being with the sole intention of _hurting_ them. This was not Kabuto clinical, this was deep and personal and fucking horrific.

And Neji realized, _'He has Itachi's eyes…'_

The white-haired ninja pressed his forehead to Neji's bare juin seal and murmured: "Tell me how much of yourself you've given to that fucking clan of yours, how much they've taken without asking, how much they've bartered away, how much of you they sold off for the sake of their own gain." His chakra burned white hot; humming inside his skin, only that thin layer of membrane separating their energies. So close it was practically contact. His voice was in his ears and inside his head. "Tell me, because, Hyuuga, it seems to me they've sold all of you to us…and if you don't say something – _right fucking now_ – we're going to take that as permission."

For a fragment of eternity, Neji panicked.

Then he remembered something very important, something key, buried beneath twelve million layers of 'anything-else-I-could-possibly-think-of'. There was something, a little truth compressed between the scar tissue of his nightmares, like a tiny penlight in the dark, blinking Morse code and he remembered _'Three months should be long enough to make you hate.' _

"You couldn't do worse if you tried." The Hyuuga met those crystal unbreakable eyes, eyes of shattered genius. "You're just one more in a world of terrible things."

There was a silence, a short, thoughtful one.

Then Takon smiled. "I told you, Mai," he said in a voice utterly conversational. He let go of the younger ninja and stepped back, the mask replaced and the naked horror that was Takon covered by the bored disinterest that was also Takon. The man yawned and wandered back to his abandoned graphic novel. "You can't torture this one. He's got eyes like a kaleidoscope. You'll never work through the mess. Best let Kabuto handle him for now. We'll just stick to the usual."

"Fine," said Mai, in a tone that was not at all 'fine'. She gestured sharply at Neji to stand. "Come on then. You've got a mission. You're team is waiting for you in Atrium Three. Look sharp, Hyuuga. It'll be hard with the little chakra you've got. Oh and," she tossed him a Sound hitae-ate, thumbing her forehead, "best cover that thing up. You'll frighten the children."

Even after he'd left their presence, the feeling Takon's eyes on his back – damned drowning pool blue – remained for hours afterward.

Consequently, he couldn't sleep much that night.

**Author's Note:**

_Say thank you to my lovely beta, __**Lellian**__. If you notice a suspicious absence of typos, it is due to her hard work and fantabulousness. (Yes, it's a word, dammit!) Her stories are a new level of awesome and – often – a source of inspiration. Go read them and be inspired. Thanks to all the wonderful people who reviewed like crazy (look at all the sadists I've attracted!) and left such lovely words of encouragement. __**Beboots **__as always, you reassure me that all those little details I cram in there are not going unread. __**Chaosdragon82**__…holy shit, you wrote a lot, which is why I like you and you're right. I won't say about what, but you're very, very right. Also a shout to __**Alowl**__ because you noticed exactly what I did and __**Monokeros**__ because I just liked your review. Hee._

_Love and Peace. _


	13. Interlude: A Brief History

**Interlude**

* * *

_:because we were once hawks, before we were nightingales_

* * *

The night of June 5th, roughly a month before his sixteenth birthday, Hyuuga Neji was rushed to the ER at a quarter to midnight, semi-conscious and mired deeply in what seemed to be a case of unexplainable aphasic shock. Upon arrival, he was suffering from intermittent seizures, hysteria and the inability to speak anything short of formless pre-operatory vowel sounds. His caretakers – a teenager and two adult branch family members no one knew – explained somewhat fervently that his curse seal had been activated continuously for a minimum of five and a maximum of twelve minutes. They couldn't be sure. He'd only been screaming for the last five minutes of it.

In the end, Shizune had been called in because, according to clan-village law, she was the only medical ninja of qualified rank allowed to get within a hundred yards of any case involving a Hyuuga Cage Seal. Even then, there was this pseudo-illicit whiff of bureaucracy about it – technically, the Hokage had to be present to okay the interaction – but when Neji had gone into convulsions and nearly bitten his tongue in half, she'd taken it upon herself to administer the medical ninjutsu and douse the killing fire in the boy's skull before it did its job and killed him. This was the second time Shizune had been called to save this particular Hyuuga's life and on both occasions the sheer brutality of his afflictions left her numb and angry.

It took two minutes to knit the muscle of his tongue back together.

Two hours to stabilize the raging chakra paths burning too hot through his brain.

"Don't call the Hyuuga head," begged the daughter. She was a pretty girl; wore her hair bound back, a clean band of gauze over her high forehead. "Please. It's my fault…"

The male Hyuuga – the father, Shizune decided, their facial structure was similar enough – stopped her with a look and the girl faded predictably into demure, tragic silence. Her bar-soap eyes were outlined in puffy red rims and she looked as though she might have just woken up, or been attacked by head pigeons. The mother took her aside and clutched her daughter with a kind of rigid terror and relief that Shizune could not begin to understand; she'd grown up thinking there wasn't a horror in the world that could shake a branch Hyuuga from their stoic global apathy.

"We brought him in because the clan medic was forbidden to help," the father said evenly. "Neji-san is my daughter's second cousin. I'll sign for him."

"We're required to contact the clan head about all Hyuuga hospitalizations," she pointed out, not because she thought he didn't know, but because there was a question there, a line of logic she needed to follow.

His deep-set mouth twisted bitterly. "I realize. I only present to you that, as his doctor, you owe Neji-san the duty to keep him safe while he's in your care." He paused significantly, his voice falling low and simmer-raging. "If you call the clan head, you will _fail_ in that duty."

Shizune deferred to Tsunade who neglected to attend her paperwork for a few days.

They roomed Neji with a wounded ANBU member who'd had his jaw wired shut for the past two weeks, giving the med-nin the quiet she needed to work. Personally, she'd always thought Neji to be – among his peers – the singularly most talented…and the most unstable. He had a bad habit of showing up in the hospital for nothing short of vital fluids and various organs leaking from aberrant holes in his body…or being crazy. Here he was again. Lying in the over-bright hospital lights he looked white, blue veins glowing through the skin of his arms, of his throat. His hair was still long and jet black, but the face it pooled around had thinned. He looked less like a Hyuuga now than he had at fourteen, less stocky, more slender. Pretty, she decided. He'd never been _pretty_ until now.

At four AM, she checked in to find his cousin (second cousin) at his bedside, holding his hand and mouthing silently. Either ignoring the fact or unaware that her cousin was still heavily sedated, she sat there, his unyielding hand cupped in hers, a frail nimbus of chakra quavering in the gaps between their fingers. From her vantage in the door, the medic caught what she'd missed during the rush of Neji's arrival: the feverishness, the red fabric burns, the kind pretty girls got thrashing their faces against futons. There were developed bruises on her wrists, blackberry clusters of them glaring ugly blue and green from the bottom of her papery arms. They were mostly hidden in the black void of her long, branch family kimono.

_Thank you_, she was saying. There were tears on her cheeks; she brought his hand to her mouth and said the words against his knuckles. _Thank you._

Shizune excused herself down the hall, where shirt-tail relatives weren't murmuring their gratitude into the grooves of a young Hyuuga's carpel bones. She wasn't sure she'd ever seen a Hyuuga hold hands with someone, never ever seen two Hyuuga hold hands. And that wasn't to say there hadn't been Hyuuga in her hospital; they just didn't touch, much less hold hands. And, if she'd bet on a Hyuuga to be the first, she'd have never put good money on Neji, conscious or not. Instead of doing her rounds that night, she foisted them on a nurse and made her way upstairs. It wasn't ever clarified why there was an auxiliary office above the hospital. Shizune always figured war-time practicality. During times of war, the Hokage needed minute-to-minute information and that included the information off her dying or wounded shinobi. Better she just be at the hospital to greet her soldiers, than waste a man playing gofer.

Hokage Tsunade was sitting with her feet kicked up on the windowsill behind her desk. Like any excellent leader, she was actively and obediently ignoring her paperwork while just as actively – though less obediently – sipping sake. She glanced in the window, examined the reflection and didn't bother to turn around.

"I know _that_ look." She knocked back another cup. "And the answer is, before you start screeching, 'no'. There's nothing I can do about it."

"With respect –"

The Hokage snorted.

"–we have witnesses and physical…evidence. What exactly is it that's stopping you?"

"Shizune, when was the last time you read the founding treaties and clan agreements of the Leaf?" She poured herself another glass. "There's a very, very interesting clause about the jurisdiction of the Hokage over the Hyuuga Clan, you should skim it sometime. Now, kindly stop being annoying and go do some good where it _can_ be done."

In her years growing up, Shizune had always found it in her to hate Konoha a little – benefits of having a Sennin for a teacher – but in a dim, abstract way. The way you hate the sound of a genocide, or injustice, or rape – nice terrible ideas that one cannot appreciate until it stares you shrieking bloody-throated murder in the face. She couldn't imagine where _Neji's_ hatred was channeling itself. Looking at him, even sleeping and hooked to an IV, she imagined some closed circuit inside his head; routing through the acid green ink on his brow, conducting into his blood and his soul and crackling through his bones, threatening to explode out and destroy everything around him.

Sometime after 5:00, when she went in to check on him, she caught him with his face in his hands. He didn't remove them, even when she moved to his bedside.

"I saw you," he told her, just so she knew. "I think I need some aspirin."

"Headache?" she asked clinically.

"Yes."

"How's your mouth?"

"I can _talk_."

"I'll get you something for the pain.

"Thank you." A pause. "Could you close the blinds?"

She stood over him for a minute, staring down at the back of his bowed neck, where his hair parted on the pale ridge of his spine. She knew she should say something, make an empty promise, vow a noble action, say something, anything, everything she could think of. But she couldn't do any of that because, really, she didn't know him or the Hyuuga or the long history, the rough hypsographic mapping of horror and hatred that was his genetic heritage. Even though she knew she shouldn't, she left him sitting in the dark.

**_- - -_**

A lazy Uchiha comes around once a blue moon, but when the genuine article reveals itself, said clan will deny it 'til they can't see straight. It's a matter of pride. Bloodlines work very hard to maintain their image, cranking out the shinobi like it's their only function, the collective business of breeding assassins. It doesn't do to have defective product. Despite this uniform aim – this even distribution of reliability of Konoha's bloodlines – to deliver talent, you can only have so long before you get that eventual inevitable outlier.

That's what they'll call him.

Outlier.

Of all the Uchiha ever to claim the name prodigy or genius, few were lazier about it than a one Uchiha Shisui. Luckily, prestigious reputation would serve to smokescreen his childhood, not that he'd live long enough to care…but for the sake of the clan name maybe it was best. Debunking the theory that all genius comes from hard work and talent, he got on with no ambition, little dedication, less motivation and the attention span of a doped squirrel. He also euthanized the theory that all genius is immediately recognized by the tender age of three; going for good six-year-run where not a single person suspected that the class slacker – you know the type, sleeping through lecture, lazing though drills – was actually secretly that guy everyone hates at the end of the year. You know; _that_ genius.

It was during this time Hatake Kakashi was making all kind of hooplah, graduating at age five, killing jounin while still slurring his r's into w's and forgetting how to spell 'assassination' on his mission reports. He was almost fourteen now, and leading ANBU squads to honor and glory, ripping off various moves from people and calling into question the sanity of a boy who has his dead team-mate's eye in his head. The details surrounding the death of Uchiha Obito remain in infamy (Kakashi's written report had been illegible) but it was the same Uchiha that sparked the conversation that would create some of the most convoluted intricacies in Konoha.

There was a lull in the fighting and for a single night there were enough jounin in the local bar to strike up conversation. Aside from getting as inebriated as humanly possible, one of the happier topics that was discussed (because everyone was sick quite literally to death of war) was the kids. Thus, during the course of conversation Obito had to be mentioned, which inevitably led to Uchiha stories, which in turn precipitated to Uchiha Shisui stories.

Two teachers, working on a joint self-appointed mission to catch Shisui at sleeping during lecture, took the seven-year-old aside one day and began to harangue him extensively about his failure in the final Henge exam. The dark-haired little boy merely jammed a finger in his ear, waggled it a bit and burst into a puff of smoke. Somewhere between the bit on 'disappointing your clan name' and 'scraping by on bottom of the barrel grades' he'd pulled a flawless kawarimi and excused himself from the conversation. The rest of the day was spent chasing the Uchiha who seemed to never be where the eyes said he was and in the pub that evening Takeshi-sensei finally, through gritted teeth and a split lip, said the magic words.

"Hell, let's just push the brat into a higher class. _That'll_ teach him."

It wasn't a serious suggestion, but when brought up by chance over warm sake and dumplings, their jounin companions thought it was such a scream that he should definitely do it. No one would notice after all; they were in the middle of a war and kids were getting pushed through to the front lines fast as they could tie a hitai-ate and if the kid could Body Flicker as well as they claimed, he might actually last long enough to get good, maybe long enough to be useful. Morbid jokes were shared, wagers made on how long the boy would last and Uchiha Shisui was transferred into the pre-genin class.

In the end only one person made any money. That was Shisui's older sister, Yuuki who betted he'd have average scores all year, then ace the final exams and make genin at the top of his class.

After his graduation ceremony Shisui thought Yuuki was being suspiciously generous, buying him a whole new outfit as congratulations and treating him to dinner. He was right to be suspicious. The young jounin made enough money off him for all the nice things she wanted for years to come, but she blew it on various unmentionables in a designer lingerie boutique out of country. Her new fiancée, a notoriously depressing Hyuuga in the branch family, was rumored to be _alarmingly _cheerful after the marriage formalities were out of the way. Shisui's nephew was conceived that year and born exactly nine months after Shisui's eight birthday on a warm day in July.

Only, perhaps three people have drawn the connections between Shisui's successful graduation, the lingerie and all the turmoil that resulted in the Hyuuga and Uchiha years later.

_**- - -**_

When Hyuuga Hizashi first met his bride, the first thing he actually met was her fist…at least according to Anko. Kakashi still swears that it was Hizashi, _not_ Uchiha Yuuki, who threw the first punch, but Maito Gai – never one to be shown up – insists that it was more of a mutual throwing of fists. What they all _do_ agree on is that this was a meeting of titans; the like of which has not yet been repeated since between the two opposing clans and may never again be repeated in their lifetimes. It involved no less than four innocent bystanders, seven not-so-innocent-jounin-who-were-egging-them-on, three different retail and dining establishments, and enough collateral damage to get both their respective clans so furious at the two of _them_, they forgot how much they hated _each other_.

"Idiot!"

"Asshole!"

"Bitch!"

"Fuck-face!"

(The truth is no one is exactly sure what the two of them were yelling at one another when they were hauled apart, but the meaning is relatively accurate.) They say the screaming and profanities were _magnificent_. They had destroyed a sushi bar, a tailoring shop, and a barbeque between them and sent eight people to the hospital not including themselves. The Yondaime – legend has it – arrived at the hospital and proceeded to the recovery ward where, for reasons undetermined, they were keeping the two combatants in the same room. Then he looked them over in their fine and varying states of bleeding, bruised and battered and told them to get a good look at one another's ugly mugs because that was all they were going to be seeing for a long time.

They were assigned scouting positions in a God-forsaken hole of the Rain, a joint assignment to teach them a lesson and get them the hell out of the village if they were going to beat the living shit out of one another. It's still a mystery what exactly happened between the two jounin while they sat in the cold and the damp, hating each other in close quarters, loathing each other while they slept back to back and detesting the sight, scent, and sensation of the other as they moved together in combat. No one can say for certain whether it was a political move, the grandest ever fuck-you, or just chemistry. It's all speculation. However, the day they came back and what happened after they finished reporting in is cold hard factual history. They turned in their gear and were walking, getting ready to go their separate ways when it happened.

Hizashi got, maybe, ten meters off before Yuuki screamed after him, "Oh, fuck you, you pretentious ass! It's the only thing they _haven't_ banned, so why the hell not?"

At which point he stopped, dropped his travel satchel, turned around, and walked back to her.

Then he grabbed and kissed her with such uncharacteristic brutality – all teeth and tongue and pent up anger – that bystanders worried momentarily for the kunoichi's safety. They got over it when the two finally pulled themselves out of their carnal tangle and stood there smirking at each other in full view and reminding everyone very suddenly that the Hyuuga elders, in all their wisdom, may have forgotten to place restrictions on branch members marrying outside the clan. After all, what Hyuuga could have foreseen Hizashi? The rejected second-hand heir to the house Hyuuga, the one Byakugan-user just pissed off enough to knock boots with a Sharingan girl? A grand 'fuck you', indeed. Wait until Hiashi heard about this, ha ha ha (various ninja rushed off to be first to break the bad news.)

Meanwhile, Yuuki cleared her throat a bit and smoothed his collar.

"You made my toes curl," she remarked.

"Did I?" he said, as if he hadn't any doubts. "Fine then. I suppose I'll have to marry you."

Which is how Shisui of the Mirage and Hyuuga Hizashi became in-laws.

_**- - -**_

Shisui was also fourteen when he first coined the phrase, "Now you see me, now you don't," and made it scary.

During battle Shisui's real claim to fame was and always had been his kawarimi. Some even went so far as to compare his Body Flicker technique with that of the Yellow Flash of Konoha before his death in the Third Great War. He was exceptional in the fact the even members of his own clan could not follow his Body Flicker, even if he told them it was coming, which, in a clan of doujutsu users, is really saying something. Though he was admittedly never a colossus of chakra or a monstrous powerhouse of jutsu or even a Sharingan prodigy, what he was was really fucking fast and cleverer than anyone.

He was known to kill missing-nin twice his skill with a basic Body Flicker and notorious for telling them it was coming when he did so. When people critiqued him for it, he would pout and argue that it was simply misdirection – and then give them a wedgie while they were distracted.

An excellent showman from beginning to end, he would present with a flourish his empty hands and with a smile most mischievous announce: "Now you see me."

At which point the real Shisui – having Body Flickered already – would shove a tanto blade between their third and fourth vertebrae and finish, "Now you don't."

_**- - -**_

Uchiha Shisui was freshly fifteen and home from an assassination when he found his front door ajar, the lock broken open, and his older sister working her way to the bottom of a sake bottle in his living room. Curled in the window sill like a dark, ill-tempered house-cat was Itachi, all fluid motion and silence that seethed like no words could. He'd come by to wait for Shisui and instead discovered the inconsolable wreck that was his older cousin sobbing into her brother's refrigerator. Apparently, he'd managed to get the story out of her before she consumed more than her personal body tolerance in alcohol and come to know that tragic sequence of events that led them to this strange and horrible present.

Hizashi was dead.

This was the crux of the problem. The main pillar of support in that delicate balancing act that was the marriage of Uchiha and Hyuuga had just been burned out of existence, literally seared out of his skull. That the house of cards toppled afterward came in no way as a surprise to anyone, least of all Itachi who'd more or less called this years in advance. Hizashi's body was only hours mailed out of country when the Hyuuga head family made the move they'd wanted to make since Yuuki, crowing somewhat, declared herself completely and manifestly pregnant. (According to her, it was a race. She won. Ha, ha, Hyuuga head family bitches. Behold the fertility of Uchiha grade womb!)

"You knew this would happen," Itachi said reasonably from the window sill.

"Course he knew," snapped Yuuki through her alcoholic blur of irritability and grief. "I knew, you knew, we_ all knew_. Didn't matter."

According to some obscure clause of Hyuuga law that up until that night no one had bothered to mention – women who marry into the Hyuuga branch family are only part of the clan so long as the Hyuuga half of the couple lives. Because Hizashi died that night in his brother's place, the Hyuuga elders took it upon themselves to assert their power effective immediately and pry a hysterical five-year-old Neji from his mother's arms and forcibly evict her from the premises. (Also according to clan law, apparently, if you're half Hyuuga on your father's side, that mathematically rounds up to full Hyuuga and gains you residential status and clan club membership. Fuck abandonment issues.)

"She _did_ light their west wall on fire," Itachi thought to mention.

"Goddamn right," murmured Yuuki wearily. "For all the good it did."

Shisui grimaced. "And…?"

He was right to expect worse.

Apparently the entire Uchiha clan was in an uproar. The Hokage had to come down to both clan estates to play peacekeeper, which was obviously not making him happy given that he'd only just averted a colossal cock-up over a certain dead Lightening Country diplomat. Apparently the diplomat had been sneaking about kidnapping the daughters of certain Konoha ninja leaders (not a good idea in retrospect, given that that relatives of said child could make your organs explode on contact) and when he got his comeuppance for being a child-napping bastard, they were calling it militant aggression. Eye for an eye! Whine, whine, whine and so forth. Give us a dead body or we'll retract our treaty and go back to killing the living daylights out of one another.

The Hokage himself had been the one to approve the body-swap, which made placating the now livid Uchiha somewhat difficult, no matter how big a war it prevented.

All over Konoha hundreds of red pinwheels were spinning vengeful and mutinous in the dark. What more proof could there be of the favoritism and prejudice against the Uchiha than this? The marriage between Hizashi and Yuuki – dripping with juvenile defiance and dysfunction as it was – had inspired hope in the village and the clans for a reunion of the Hyuuga and Uchiha bloodlines. For the Uchiha, a shot at being treated less like attack dogs and more like equals. More like the Hyuuga were treated. Hizashi's death – so suspiciously timed at Hinata-sama's coming of age – was no less than blatant sabotage on behalf of the head house to keep the Uchiha downtrodden.

When the Hokage pointed out diplomatically that they were talking about the life of one man for the sake of the whole village, then it was favoritism of the head family over the branch, a degeneration of human rights and a horror of Leaf Village politics. Why Hizashi when it was Hiashi they wanted? Furthermore, how did Hizashi's death justify the separation of a now fatherless five-year-old boy from his mother and only parent? The Hokage's negotiation meant nothing; he had no jurisdiction over the Hyuuga's out-dated breeding plans, everyone knew that. The Uchiha were on the brink of backlash rebellion.

There was a long pause, Itachi having recounted all imperative parts for his cousin, and Yuuki burped in the background.

"Shit," laughed Shisui a little weakly. "I'm gone for a week and look what happens."

"The Third is with the Hyuuga now. He is trying to negotiate for custody."

"And you think he can do that? Shanghai the Hyuuga nobility into compromising for us commoners?"

Itachi lifted his head into the dim moonlight, face pale and just perceivably sorry. "I don't know, Shisui." He closed his eyes. "I suppose…"

"Fuck that," Yuuki spat. Her sake bottle exploded against the lintel next to Itachi's head, splattering both boys with alcohol and startling their Sharingans red. She wobbled to her feet, smirking, drunken madness in her too beautiful face, her stinking hair hung in salty strings. "The Hokage won't do shit. He won't do anything to protect the rights of an Uchiha, and certainly not against a member of the head family. Every Hyuuga elder is against me and that's it. I've already begun to face it. I have no choice."

Shisui crossed the room and took his sister by the shoulders. "We are not losing Neji."

"No. I'm not." Yuuki straightened her clothes a little, brushed her hair from her eyes. "I'm cutting a deal. I gave them one prodigy. Hell if I can't promise them another one, on the right side of the family tree this time, eh?"

"What?" Shisui's face contorted briefly in confusion then dawned in horror. "_No_."

"Hiashi's wife is dead and their heir is weak. I can give them what they want and get what I want."

"You're not selling yourself just so you can keep your own child!" Shisui snarled, shaking her a little.

"I've _lived_ in that house," she sneered. "Women selling themselves isn't an anomaly. They'll jump on it."

"We know what the Hyuuga are like, Yuuki-neesan." The Mirage lowered his voice. "They won't…let you."

"Yeah," she snapped. "You're right. I'll probably never see Neji again, but if I have Hiashi's ear _fuck_ all if I can't get him to protect my son. If I'm there, even if I can't touch him, or just be with him, at least I can…" Her voice broke a little. "…I can _watch_ him."

"I refuse," murmured Itachi, "to believe we've fallen so far as a clan that they would ignore a mother's plea for protection."

"A widow's plea," she added, her mouth cutting a gash of teeth. "They won't help me. You know they won't. Hyuuga get what they want, the village dogs get beat back into place. It's been this way since the Third Great War and it'll only get worse and you fucking know it's the truth." Her eyes alighted on Itachi. "The village will not tolerate our pleas for anything, equality least of all," she said so sweetly that the content of poison was undoubted. "They will use us until we're spent and find a new clan to throw on the frontlines. Fuck any blind idiot who says otherwise."

**_- - -_**

Uchiha by tradition were renowned for three things, the Sharingan, their raw chakra capacity, and having fantastic hair. Throughout the clan's history it had not gone unnoticed that the clan's strongest warriors tended to have the most radical hair-styles around. (If you want proof, check the old photographs of Uchiha Madera. He wasn't just the most powerful man alive back then, he was also the best styled.) In fact a less known exploit of their clan was their monopoly on the hair-stylist trade. Back before they were each and every one of them slaughtered mercilessly in the dark, all the wives and kunoichi spent their coin in the Uchiha civilian block barber shops. (They were also notorious for over-charging because they could get away with it.)

By the time Shisui was sixteen he was arguably the strongest member of his clan, challenged only informally by his younger cousin Itachi who'd already accomplished hair chic with the traditional jagged bang cut that was ever so popular back then – functional and stylish! (It's since then experienced a drop in popularity, having now been permanently associated with mass murder.)

Shisui however, being the indolent little teenaged snot that he really was, was simply too damn lazy to get his ass in gear and get a proper haircut. Mostly he took kunai to his bangs during missions for the first four years of his career and was therefore dubbed the 'Slightly Lopsided Porcupine' by his subordinates. Inconceivable as it sounds, many people bought into the old stereotype about Uchiha strength-to-hair ratio and among a crowd of Sharingan users, Shisui was never elected at first glance as strongest.

Prettiest, maybe, but not strongest.

Despite the insistence of both his sister and many friends beside, he elected not to improve his hair and – because he was sick of the Porcupine joke – grew it out, knotted it back and went around looking more like a Hyuuga than anyone was comfortable pointing out.

There's actually a story about that – of dubious authenticity of course – where a head family member confronted him about it and exchanged with him some words that more or less meted out to 'you're far too _Uchiha_ (i.e. _common_) to wear your hair like that'. To which Shisui responded in a most gentlemanly fashion by removing his fighting glove and slapping said Hyuuga in the face with it. Given no other choice, his opponent accepted the challange – as per usual – the collateral damage was ridiculous. He put the snotty Hyuuga in the hospital…by which I mean he blasted him through the south wall of Konoha General and into the lobby.

It _is_ common knowledge that the south wall has a suspicious plastered hole in the waiting room.

_**- - -**_

One thing you absolutely could not forget about Uchiha Shisui – besides the fact he could kill you with his pinky – was the fact he'd grown up with the singular talent of imagination and the ability to act on that imagination and was therefore a magnificent liar. He existed in a perpetual state of creative upheaval so insistent that he was known to carry about with him bits of scratch paper, even on missions, so he could scribble ideas. Strangest of all was the fact that despite this prolific drive to write, Shisui never attempted to publish anything. Two years after his death, it was discovered by chance that several of his stories were posthumously stolen and published by a man who made tens of thousands off the revenue.

But that's not important.

What's important was the fact that Shisui's mind worked in such a way that allowed for him to instantaneously and immediately conjure forth wild circumstances and complex illusions of reality without an iota of shame or uncertainty. He was made famous for this at his promotion to jounin when he underwent a simulated capture and interrogation and managed to convince several experienced special-jounin that his father had died in the Stone Country at the hands of three sadistic missing-nin (famous for their habit of leaving all their conquests emasculated and beheaded, naturally). He also persuaded them that his little sister was a paraplegic deaf-mute and his middle name was Mitaru. The last part was only funny because the interrogators actually had records of his full name and should have known better.

"He's a compulsive liar," Yuuki freely informed others. "Don't believe anything he says."

His sister's opinion was somewhat inaccurate, truthfully. The fact was that he did _not_ lie compulsively. It was just that whenever he did happen to lie he did it so well as to make all his truth suspect. As a result, Shisui was given to concocting fantastic, utterly ridiculous stories and telling them to anyone who'd listen, which either made him the best company for an outpost or the worst, depending on how much you liked stories.

One story in particular drew some attention after the massacre, the one Shisui told his subordinates during his last mission before heading home. Namiashi Raido was one of the ANBU working with them at the time. Raido was also one of many shinobi questioned following the Uchiha massacre during the investigation seeking some sanity, some reason behind the incomprehensible madness. Namely, why the hell did Uchiha Itachi snap? Work load? Genetic psychosis? Emotional trauma? Stress? Guilt? Greed? What?

Speculation suggested that Shisui may have had a hand, intentional or not, in setting the prodigy off down his road to mass murder and Raido's commentary on their last mission together provided plenty of room for gossip. Raido remembered it clearly because Shisui had been so weirdly calm about it, devoid of his usual manic bravado. Hyper, grinning and kicking ass was the perpetual state of his existence, so this was a noticeable deviation from the norm.

"He just kind of sat there real quiet for a while," explained Raido "We're all going to sleep when suddenly, out of the blue, he starts telling us this story. And I mean it's a _story_. He goes on and on about this supposed battle that took place during the First Great War down in the Wind Country, this massive slaughter between the Hyuuga and these two allied clans from the north. He rolled out this huge, massive goddamn dialogue. By the time he finished everyone was awake and hanging on every word. End sucked though. Apparently he hadn't bothered to think one up.

"Shisui was dead by the time I looked into it afterwards. Turns out there _was_ a battle recorded between the Hyuuga and Wind clans, but only the Hidden Sand has the records…and maybe the Hyuuga, but they aren't saying. Anyway, the battle may have happened but there's no way it happened with any of the stuff Shisui talked about. I mean…shit. He said some really fucked up stuff. Great story, but c'mon."

He was most likely referring to the details of the story regarding members of the Hyuuga branch family and the origins of the Cage Seal. Suffice to say, it was not a tale complementary to the head family. Not unsurprising given Shisui's past with the Hyuuga, his sister, and all bad blood stemming from the mixture. That he might concoct a tale to drag the head family's reputation through the mud wasn't inconceivable or unfounded, however that he might choose to voice it just then struck some as peculiar.

A point some chose to emphasize was that Itachi had been in that outfit, had listened to the story too. Because Raido was the only surviving member of that particular four-man team (excluding Itachi who was fucking insane and a missing-nin) it's his word only that people have to go on when he said that Shisui seemed to have been directing his narrative at his relative. This supposition was reinforced when, after Shisui trailed off and ended his story in silence, Itachi grew uncharacteristically angry, got to his feet and told his cousin 'you don't understand anything' and stormed off.

"I don't know, but I thought Shisui looked pretty torn up," Raido would later admit. "But that could have been my memory playing tricks. I mean, what Itachi did to him…it would be little wonder if my mind filled in some blanks. Who kills their best friend like that? I mean they were the closest daring duo in Konoha and then it ended like that?" There was a pause. "I wouldn't be half surprised if there was some kind of meaning behind that story, a warning, maybe an ultimatum between them, but fuck if I know. Those two were incomprehensible as the sun."

Uchiha Shisui was found dead in the Nanako River less than a month after this mission. Initial investigation pointed to suicide, but the eye-witness account from lone survivor of the massacre, Uchiha Sasuke, revealed that Itachi had apparently slain his cousin in cold blood. Closer examination revealed signs that someone may have held the jounin's head underwater. However lack of defensive bruising or postmortem medical ninjutsu suggested a genjustu or toxin had been used to induce paralysis. However, this conclusion too left unanswered questions and inconsistencies. If either poison or genjutsu had been applied, it would have been found in the autopsy, as both methods leave residue of their action within the body.

None was found.

The only conclusion that these facts seemed to lead to (the one they all refused to draw before closing the case and calling it cold) was that Shisui of the Mirage, the fastest living shinobi in the Leaf, one of the most powerful and clever jounin of his generation – had lay down and let his killer drown him.

In the end, they ruled that Itachi had used some kind of mild genjutsu, just strong enough to convince his cousin he wasn't drowning while his lungs filled with water, but just weak enough to leave no synaptic evidence in his brain. In the end, none of the investigators into his death could imagine what kind of twisted wire in the mind could possibly lead to that, to such an awful intimate betrayal. What soul-deep reason could have been so persuasive, so precious or so horrific as to lead to that scene on the river? One brother crouched on the rippled mirror of water, holding the other's face just under the surface, waiting for that last burst of air to break the reflective silver moon and signal the end of everything.

_**- - -**_

It was snowing out the day Hinata realized that Neji loved her little sister more than she did. She remembered because she'd been standing inside warming tea in the Sakura's kitchen when she chanced to look up and see Hanabi sprinting across the street, shrieking in a manner completely inappropriate for the heir of the Hyuuga head house. Then – just as inappropriately – her elder cousin blinked into existence, darting out of some hidden pocket of nowhere and grabbing the little girl up in his arms like an over dressed teddy bear. He then proceeded to heft her under his arm like a badly-behaved sack of potatoes and continue on his way down the street. Protests of 'Stoppit! Stoppit right now!' and 'You're embarrassing me!' and 'I _order_ you to put me down!' rang ineffectively in the cold December air.

Hinata set her tea aside and watched them.

It was just after Academy, so Neji must have been ordered to escort the Hyuuga heiress back from school. Apparently, she hadn't fancied the idea of a baby-sitter and made a break for it, which lead inevitably to the debacle that was Hyuuga Neji forcibly hauling the shrieking Hyuuga Hanabi up the street under his arm. When the threats against major and various faculties of his person became too graphic and offensive for even his patience to bear, he very unceremoniously halted and dropped Hanabi in a large snow bank. Then, dusting snow form his spotless sleeve, he walked away with great and apparent indifference. Hanabi's screaming invectives became even more copious.

While Hanabi extracted herself from the snow Hinata wondered when this had happened. When had the dynamics of Neji's perspective shifted so violently that he could freely express something suspiciously like brotherly affection? And to the second daughter of the clan head no less? Furthermore, when had Hanabi quit looking at their cousin as something to be controlled? When had Hanabi turned a deaf ear to her grandmother's poison. _A defiant subordinate needs discipline. A firm hand and firmer handling. Do you understand, Hana-chan?" _When had Hanabi – hungry, ambitious, driven Hanabi – fixed upon Neji as her guiding star and clung to him? When had her little sister finally seen – '_Byakugan be damned, they were blind as anyone!_ ' – an elder brother through the haze of hatred and clan-wide disgust that was Neji's breathing space?

Outside, Hanabi aimed a kick at Neji's shin, which he accepted with good-natured stoicism and they continued walking back toward the main house. There was no one watching but Hinata, so no other witnesses when Hanabi's hand snuck out and caught in her cousin's, weaving easily into the mesh of his fingers, holding on and, in turn, being held onto. And the thought crossed her mind – _'They look just fine together. They _look_ like brother and sister._'

"Ha ha! I found the little bastards!" crowed Sakura from the bedroom. She emerged with two videotapes, picking a sock off one of them and tossing it back to the nuclear wasteland of her room. "Knew they were around here somewhere. Are you coming, Hinata-chan? I've got _junkfood_." She waggled a bag of unknowable foodstuffs. "C'mon, chips, candy, there's ice cream hiding somewhere if you can find it in the freezer somewhere and – hey. Oh, hey, Hinata. Hinata, are you okay?"

Hinata took her tea from the counter top and tilted a hot mouthful onto her tongue. It burned down the back of her throat into her stomach, pooling inside her while a different kind of warmth swam through her blood and through her chest. She wiped a hand across her cheeks in an effort to mop up the wet tracks now lined in glistening wet down her face.

"Yes," she managed. "Yes, I'm fine. Thank you."

Sakura came over and touched her arm gently. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"I can't. It's not about me it's…I'm sorry. Let's get started on that ice cream."

"I've got triple chuck chocolate. Whatever your heartache, promise that'll fix it up."

**_Author's Note: _**

_Wow, long time no see. Took a while to get back to this, hope no one's too angry with me but I'll be damned. It wasn't easy trying to draw all the lines between the Uchiha and the Hyuuga that I wanted. These shorts are just some the pieces I came up with and they explain a bit, but not everything, not even remotely. I always wanted to do a piece on Shisui but I never got around to it. But fear not, the Neji torture is back full swing next chapter. And lucky you, it's already written up. Should be posted within the week if plot bunnies don't kill me first. _

_Also, for those of you who were are having issues seeing who's related to who, just say so in your review and I'll send you a summary of Hyuuga-Uchiha family history. I will probably be clarifying things to a greater degree within the next several chapters. Remember reveiws and questions are my bread and butter. They make my writing world go round. _

_Next chapter: fear of change._


	14. Tropophobia

**Tropophobia**

* * *

_: fear of change_

* * *

There were nightmares first; Kabuto had been right about that.

But there were other things too, thankfully, that managed to float high enough in his subconscious not to be repressed the moment they formed. In sleep, the mind seeks equilibrium and a chance to even out the gross imbalances of the day. Deep in a REM cycle, Hyuuga Neji's mind fought to repair itself in whatever way it could.

_**- - -**_

_Neji ran into Hanabi in the hallway as he was leaving. _

"_Neji." Her voice was deadened; an echo of the contemptuous head family heiress addressing her inferior family member and for an instant a thread of hot dangerous fire snaked through his belly and down his arms. '_Wait…' _Neji shook off the initial vicious bias of his reaction and recognized her tone as the demand for attention, nothing more. She was a child trying to gain his notice. It was… it was just Hanabi. Hanabi. He turned to face her. _

"_What is it?"_

_She held out her hand. "I found these in the branch gardens." Her eyes were hard. "They're not yours." _

_Nesting in her palm: the alien kunai he'd left behind. There was no room for argument in Hanabi's expression, no chinks of hesitation or doubt, that annoying absolute confidence inherent in the brilliant and the utterly incorrigible. The fact she knows Neji prefers long Sunakagure style kunai to the tell-tale standard-issue shorts in her hand is both endearing and irritating. The older Hyuuga knelt down in front of the girl, looking at her for a moment. It seemed so strange that she hadn't changed a fraction since the last time he'd seen her only some six or seven hours ago, still a ten-year-old girl with pale lavender eyes and soft black hair. _

_He took the kunai from her and used one to cut a piece of paper from one of his spare jutsu scrolls. "Do you know how to fold a paper crane?" he asked her, his eyes downcast, slicing the paper into a reasonable square on the floor. _

"_Yeah." She watched him suspiciously. "Hinata showed me once."_

_Neji showed her the paper, holding it out like a flashcard he expected her to memorize. She stared at it, then at him, eyes wavering between the desire to understand the lesson here and the suspicion her cousin was taking her for a ride. The paper quivered. Then it bowed toward the younger Hyuuga like a tiny white dancer and began to crease in on itself, like a video on fast forward, folding and pleating in rapid-fire movements until Neji had to drop it into his open palm so it could finish its self-perpetuating transformation. After a moment it quivered to a stop and tipped upright._

_He handed her the pristine origami crane. _

"_Use your chakra and only your chakra to fold it. It's an old trick." He closed his eyes, tucking his bangs behind his ear. "It's how I trained for the Sixty-Four Hands." He looked at her. "I'm going to be gone a while. Make as many as you can every day. If you can make one thousand perfect paper cranes by the time I get back, I'll train you." _

"_Really?" she blurted eagerly. He looked at her and she blushed. "I mean…I accept your terms, Neji-kun."_

"_Hanabi…" he began, forgetting the formal title. _

_But after he'd said it, he realized quite absurdly he'd opened his mouth without intending to say anything else. Having planned nothing more, he just stood there with his heart kicking around somewhere behind his tongue, inconveniently tangling his heartstrings among his vocal cords. His cousin was looking expectantly up at him, waiting for the rejoinder that he couldn't give because it was just so inconceivably much to say. Too intangible, too massive, too internal to get past the knot in his throat and he stood there choked silent by it, staring down at this tiny girl who looked like him. It suddenly _hurt_ how much she looked like him and how much no one ever mentioned it. _

_She frowned. "Yes?"_

"…"

"_What?"_

"_I need to go, Hanabi-sama. I'm sorry."_

_He turned away and set off down the hall, moving quickly because he'd become painfully aware of the tightness in his windpipe, like a physical thing clawing inside him. He needed to get away. Now. Before he said something and shattered a decade of carefully kept clan law and ruined him, her, and everything…_

"_Wait! Nii-san!" _

_He stopped._

_Her hand closed on his sleeve. "You have to promise to come back," she told him grouchily. "I'm not making all those cranes for nothing,"_

_Neji turned and knelt down in front of her. Her expression remained petulantly curious even as he placed his hands on her shoulders and studied her frowning face. When she'd started using him as her unofficial measuring post he wasn't sure. When he'd started seeing her as something more than his cousin he didn't know. But he did know this much – _

_It must have startled her when he tipped his forehead, clothed only in a single black band, against hers and stood there in the hall with her, the closest he'd ever let her be. She smoldered like embers, not earth and solidarity as most Hyuuga did. Her energy felt of the bursting firecracker potential of her namesake. Like gunpowder and fire and he felt her open her chakra a little to him, reaching out and around him with it and they stood together like that. They hoped no one was watching, because this small token of intimacy crossed lines that Neji, in all of his years of defiance and spite, had never crossed. _

_It wasn't enough. It wasn't enough and he knew it because there were ten years stolen from them and no time now. But he'd needed something – anything – to remind him that his world was not a Mangekyou blur of loathing and hatred. That he had something to protect even now. He held the memory of her face, the tiny slope of her shoulders like a good-luck charm in his fingers._

"_I'll be back soon," he promised. "That's all. See you then, nee-chan."_

_**- - -**_

"Hanabi." Neji woke with her name on his lips and for a moment he wasn't broken. He was still okay.

Then memory caught up to him and he wasn't okay at all.

Thickly he rubbed his hand over his face a couple times and the pain hit him instantaneously and suddenly his head was a mess of fragmented memory, running rampant in his skull. The world reeled and dizzily and everything hit him at once; a slurry of broken, tangled thoughts: Orochimaru, Hinata, _him_, Itachi, _everything_… He was drowning in it, pressing the heel of his hand into his forehead and corralling the need to ram his fist through a tree or drop to his knees and scream or something. _'It's just temporary,'_ he reminded himself uselessly._ 'It'll pass. Just ride it out. Just don't…'_

Sound voices roared like howling sirens, penetrating the silence of his mind and filling it with a smog of treacherous noise, insidious suggestions, guilty, ugly what-ifs that had the potential to obliterate him and everything he was. It felt like he was coming apart. That he was suffocating, that he was going _insane_… And all at once he slammed back against the rough bark of the pine behind him, gasping because something was _crawling up his fucking arm!_ Slathering, hissing, sucking against his skin, clawing toward his face –

But there was nothing there.

Staring at his blank arm, Neji felt that his mornings had the distinct possibility of always being like this. Somehow, the yawning emptiness of the realization numbed him so deeply he couldn't even _move_ under the weight of it. He just closed his aching eyes and swallowed down the liquid toxic terror of it. Nothing could fix this. Nothing could fix this ever. This kaleidoscope reality was his now. This was his world. He was covered in chakra ink and bandages, people's branded claims on every inch of him until he was anything and everything but belonging to himself. He wondered thickly how much of his life he'd spent trying to convince himself otherwise. It was so easy.

"Neji-sensei?"

Nishi's eyes were big and sparkled frightened animal green in that darkness, staring out at him from the folds of her travel blanket. Neji could not say for sure how long she'd been watching him so he functioned on the assumption she hadn't seen him wake up panicking.

"You should try to sleep, Nishi."

"I'm an insomniac. Always have been."

"Nevertheless, you should try."

"I did. I heard you…" She blushed in the dark.

"It was nothing, Nishi. You don't need to worry," he assured her convincingly as he could (which wasn't very) and nodded toward the fire. "Just try to relax before dawn. We'll make the last leg back to the Sound today."

There was a hesitant pause.

Neji sighed. "Unless you'd like to keep watch with me, Nishi. You may do that too."

She sat up eagerly in her blanket, the green cloth wrapped around her so only her pale face glowed in the thin rays of moonlight, making her face a patch work of dark and light spots. It was hard to tell if she was expecting him to answer. She wriggled a little closer and hunkered down next to him, a little ball of ten-year-old warmth against his hip. She was looking very, very little…and pink. God, she was so _pink_. It was absurd that this little girl had put three kunai in a Stone chuunin's face earlier today, but there she was, his fake Sound student scooting close enough to touch and peering intently up at him through her Hanuro Sakura hair. Some sleeping monstrosity stirred in his midriff and he bit it down with a physical effort.

Another strange twist of his day: that it seemed he'd come under the regular employ, beck, and call of Konohagakure's number one philosophical enemy village to go forth and kill said enemy Stone-nin in the first place. Yeah, fine, it wasn't like they of the Leaf were overly fond of the Stone and it wasn't like these particular Stone shinobi hadn't so nobly tried to A: gut his genin team unprovoked. B: threaten his kunoichi with unspeakable war crimes that resulted in the aforementioned kunai to the face. But that was beside the point. The Point – what was his point? Fuck, he'd had one, what was…? – the Point was he was a Leaf ninja, a Hyuuga of Konoha and he was doing as Orochimaru – Lord of the Fucking Criminally Insane – commanded. Therein laid the problem.

This was not supposed to happen.

He wasn't supposed to be…to be…_this_. What the fuck was he? How long had he been like this? He didn't know for sure; he'd spent so many days locked in the dark, of a dungeon, of his mind, or both that Time had been stripped away to a meaningless word. A one syllable word he couldn't get his head around anymore, like the way he used to wholly understand the concept behind A-class chakra gate implosion but could only remember the theory now – in the same way he could only remember Time as a theory. But that was because he'd just woken up. He was always more fucked up in the mornings. Now why was that?

"Neji-sensei," Nishi stared determinedly up at him, "can I ask you something?"

He considered her face a moment then nodded.

"Are you a member of… of the Hyuuga's branch family?"

By the fire, Minami and Tachi were dozing mightily, Tachi snoring through his nose, Minami making small swiping motions with her hands – slaying dream enemies in flight. Nishi fingered the stitching on the edge of her blanket like she was trying to find some worrisome thing in the cloth, the same worrisome thing that must have prompted her to ask this question tonight. He wondered again, uselessly, how much of his subconscious found its way onto his tongue while sleeping.

"What makes you ask that, Nishi?"

His evasive counter question triggered a blush that would have been lost in the dark to anyone but a Hyuuga. She bought time by tugging her blanket up about her ears – perhaps conscious of her coloring cheeks despite the dark – and fiddled with it a little bit.

"Kabuto-kun…Kabuto-sempai told me that in Konoha, the Hokage lets…bad things happen to the branch family." She hesitated momentarily (hopefully) to see if he'd add something. When he didn't she went on. "H-he said that the head family uses curse seals, _bad_ curse seals. The kind that hurt you if you disobey." Her voice lowered fearfully. "He said they use them on _children_."

There was a time he wouldn't have hesitated to reply it was so.

There was a more recent time he _would_ have hesitated to say it was so.

And then there was now, full circle, and he didn't hesitate to say, "They do." (He didn't bother to point out Orochimaru used even worse ones. No point. Kabuto's brainwashing was a thorough thing and he didn't have the patience to argue the point tonight.) "They use juin seal techniques on the branch."

Nishi gazed up at him with that paradoxical awe that ninja children could so easily grasp. He could see it in her face, in her pale skin, in the posture of her bones inside the trembling wrathful wrap of her muscles that she was appalled by this truth and it made Neji want to laugh. Not five hours ago, this little girl had utilized a cruelly brutal combination of genjutsu and choke-wire to take a man's head off his shoulders at close range and yet, here she was, sitting with her sensei and righteously horrified. Against the enemy, all horrors and all manner of martial force were necessary and morally unquestionable, but crimes against her own – _unspeakable_. Neji knew her type of ninja and it sickened him (thrilled him) on a baser level that she'd come to regard him as one of her protected people.

Neji regarded her coolly as ever. "But what makes you think I'm branch family?"

Nishi looked surprised. "I – I don't…" She looked off, gathered herself. "Why would a head family member run? A branch member has the best reasons to defect."

"Nishi, in the history of Konoha there has never been a renegade Hyuuga from the branch." Neji found his hand had inadvertently formed the simple hand position that released the seal. He showed it to her. "One seal. That's all it takes Nishi. One." He lowered his hand. "Branch family doesn't escape, even to other countries."

"S-so you're a member of the head family?"

"Of course not. I'm a branch family member."

Despite her tolerant shyness, that particular runaround managed to get the girl's dander briefly up and she glowered at him. Four weeks ago ('_Four? Really? Or is it more like two? God it's so hard to tell_…') she would have been far too demure with him to dare anything like question him about his past, much less glare at him. Unfortunately, fighting together, training, sleeping, eating, killing together had the affect of dispelling the initial glamour of a jounin sensei, no matter how exotically fucked up he might be. She'd started hedging him with questions the way new teammates inevitably did. Though, with far more grace than her sister or Tachi, whose primary method of interrogation was: 'So, sensei, is it true that the Hyuuga are inbred scary sons of bitches or is that just hype?'

But here she was, questioning him, all curious concerned eyes in the dark and he slid a senbon needle from a wrist holster so he had something to fiddle with while he spoke. ('_Oh, look at all my fine Hyuuga-bred grace now. Fidgeting, for fuck's sake…_') He waited for her next question.

"So you ran?"

"Yes." He lied.

"Why defect to the Sound?"

"Kabuto made me the offer."

A momentary silence followed.

"How old were you when –?"

"I got mine when I was four."

Nishi stared, her eyes like two giant glow bugs in the dark. "_Four_?"

"It was a long time ago, Nishi. I don't really remember it." _'Liar. You God-awful fucking liar.' _"It didn't hurt."

He'd screamed for hours. The Cage Seal had disagreed with his eyes for some reason, like his stupid four-year-old body had sensed the danger, detected the Cage Seal as the evil, dangerous virus monster that it was. And his little-boy's brain had attacked it with all the fire and vicious panic it could muster. Hiashi himself had run Neji from the head estate down to the branch where his father had stood waiting in the street all day long. Neji remembered his uncle's voice and his father's, screaming at one another with the panic and gut-deep intimate hatred that can only be had between blood. It was, Neji remembered, the first and only time he ever talked back to Hiashi in public and got away with it. Almost killing your twin brother's firstborn – be he branch family or not – suspends things like rank and decorum.

"Can I see it?"

"No."

She blushed.

"Go to sleep, Nishi." He nodded toward the fire. "I'll wake you soon enough."

She moved obediently toward the fire, pausing only ask worriedly, "Will they come after you, sensei?"

Neji shivered a little inside. "They might," he replied and disliked the truth in it. "But that's not something you need worry about. Try to rest for –," He stopped.

Nishi, sensing the peculiarity in this sudden stop turned to look at him. "Neji-sensei?"

"Just…go lie down," he managed, voice a shake too breathy for his liking. He stood to his feet and pivoted away from her, striding toward the woods. "I'll be back, just…stay with the others. I'll be back."

He felt her eyes follow her sensei into the darkness, but she remained where she was, her sister and her teammate arrayed on the ground around her. Neji moved quickly then; ducking out of sight to press his back to the bole of a tree. Cool bark picked threads in his back, scratching his shoulder blades with little claws. His hands shook as he tugged his hitai-ate from his brow and felt of ice when he touched his head. The mark on his forehead burned hot under his palm, a coiled wire of fire in his skin, fused to the outside of his skull. He closed his eyes and realized he could still see the canopy.

_**- - -**_

The missions got steadily worse.

Try as he might, Neji found it harder and harder to keep the three Sound genin safe. They began to look worse and worse, the glow of their energy dimming like old flashlights as their scars grew in number and frequency, appearing suddenly and violently and lingering until only taut white skin remained stretched over once unwounded flesh. Neji found himself fighting most of the battles now, because good as they were, these missions had become too much for ten-year-old ninja, no matter how well they used their chakra and their determination. So he reassigned them to back up, to cover-fire, to distraction and defense.

It didn't matter. Soon the missions became so difficult, he couldn't afford to keep them off the frontlines and they joined him in the thick of it. Some days they excelled, some days they nearly died and Neji had to patch them back together like battered dolls. Day after day they fought. His students were wearing out like overused rugs and he couldn't stop it. Kabuto remained merciless. If Neji rejected a mission, they tortured him until he accepted. If he failed a mission, they sent him on a harder one. He designed the pattern so Neji would have to decide: was defiance now worth the physical toll and the cost that would bring him (his team) in the next mission?

Soon Neji was accepting them out of sheer exhaustion.

What did it matter if the conclusion would always remain the same?

He tried to escape several times, nearly succeeded the first time by successfully knocking out and impersonating Ban. He gained access to one of Oto's labs in the secondary sub-levels and speed read through a mess of classified records and lab reports, base locations, jutsu research and came across a file on Hidden Sound curse seals that made his head reel. He was almost out when Takon caught him.

"Reconnaissance, huh? Should have known. Whoops. Sorry. Well, Kabuto can put that back in place later, after you tell me what you took, Neji. Look at me. This is very important. What did you read _exactly_?"

After that they were always ready for him.

Battles became a blur of blood and chakra, strange pointless, disjointed missions that Neji saw no pattern or reason to besides their consistent suicidal nature. He felt himself sliding into the rhythm of it, the merciless state of minimalist murder. He functioned in a state of constant motion but never of excess. He cut _just_ deep enough to sever the artery, hit _just_ enough strikes to stop the heart, moved _just_ fast enough to avoid being wounded, saved his students _just_ in time to preserve their lives. Enemies began to fall faster, became smears of whiplash time fragments where his kunai met brief resistance, sliding through thick wet muscle, where his chakra burned a hole through vital tissue, blew apart delicate internal structures.

He couldn't remember where he was, why he was, who he was.

Still, constantly, when all the panic and nausea and exhaustion had beat away his fear, he would refuse. Kabuto would just smile then, his teeth and the twin circles of light that hid his eyes grinning and glinting in the dark. He would ask, "Are you sure, Neji-kun, that you refuse to take this mission?" He would, like a hundred times before, say "Yes." Then Kabuto would bring Takon and Mai and Juri and Ban and Neji would fight them. A screaming fast-forward segment of chakra burns and Gentle Fist, of pain and refusal. He'd refuse and refuse and refuse until the violations and violence overwhelmed the jounin and shattered him to sixteen years old. Then he'd accept the next mission and try to forgive himself for it.

Neji was a jounin of the Leaf.

He'd never felt so alone.

_**- - -**_

The Grass-nin came out of nowhere.

He hadn't seen it coming; he blamed fatigue and incompetence and Kabuto (because _fuck it_, it was _always_ Kabuto's fault) for sending them out to the middle of no-fucking-where to get ambushed by a chuunin squad in the prairie land.

Neji hurled into the Kaiten so quickly his students squeaked at the sudden twister-cloud of aqua light. Though, their alarm was little compared to their cries of horror when four exploding tags – one for each of them – went off against Neji's shield of motion and chakra. He'd been on enough body-guard missions now that the act of cocooning others in his defense came as easily as the spin itself, but the explosions were massive and the second to last one blew a hole in Neji's defense and the last one slammed him to the ground. For a split second there was a haze of black and blue as his Byakugan battled the head trauma, a screaming E-flat tone whined into the cloud of static silence his head.

He could feel Nishi laying down a mask of genjutsu and Tachi cranking out Bunshin to mask their locations. Minami was hurling kunai like no tomorrow screaming at him – to get his lazy ass _up_ and_ do_ something – and because they were his responsibility (like it or not) Neji shook the ringing from his ears and stood up. The first Grass-nin came at him with a katana, slicing a long slit in the sleeve of Neji's robes, then another near his thigh, his ribs, and finally a glancing edge parted the skin across his collarbone in a neat line of blood.

'_He's using a time distortion jutsu.'_

Neji formed the release seal. "Kai!"

The world leapt forward into real time and the Grass-nin (the jounin captain) leapt back, regaining the safety of distance. He was older, forty-something. Some long ago battle had left the man with a crisscross scars bisecting his left cheek and splitting his upper lip in a cleft. Though ancient for an active ninja, that kind of age – to Neji – only spoke of experience and cunning. It was obvious he recognized Juuken. Grim grey eyes roved up Neji's profile, taking in his stance and posture in a weary kind of way, as though this had not been what he or any of his team could have expected to be fighting.

Neji shot forward, chakra induced speed snapping him into close combat before the man could get word to his subordinates. He knocked the blade aside with a bare hand gloved in chakra, stopped a defensive kunai with counter grab and slammed his forehead into the man's face. The two jounin leapt apart, Neji flipping back and hopping deftly to his Juuken stance again, the Grass-nin stepping away with a hand to his bloodied nose.

"Damn Soundies," he muttered then put two fingers to his mouth and whistled.

Someone entered his Hakke and Neji engaged them with Juuken, instantly disabled her light leg and knocked out the tenketsu points in her right shoulder. With a snarl, his opponent – female chuunin, twenties, good with taijutsu – whipped a scroll from her hip and tore it open with her teeth and suddenly the air was full of kunai. ('_Projectile summoning. Like Tenten. Neutralize her_.') He spun into a Kaiten, chakra caching up the storm of metal like raindrops and throwing them like toys across the battleground –

Neji Body Flickered and tackled Nishi some ten meters away, looping an arm around her middle and throwing her clear of the massive shadow shuriken she'd failed to see. _Flicker! _And he was back to the jounin, driving a series of Juuken strikes in and around the man's terrifying sword dance, but never close enough to –

_Flicker_! He blocked a chuunin's kunai stab as it whistled down for Tachi's throat. Neji rewarded the startled shinobi by slamming a handful of hot chakra into his belly and destroying a knot of his small and large intestines. Tachi shouted, but Neji saw second chuunin and his swinging tanto blade. He ducked it, sideways somersault, slashed out with the kunai he'd extracted from the dying man's fingers. Hot wet spray arced through the air, splattered the grass in blood. The wounded shinobi had the sense to pull a substitution and regroup, but not before Nishi's exploding tag took the back of his head off in a wet burst of bone and –

Minami shrieked.

Neji spun and put the kunai into the aim of the female chuunin, who had to block and missed her chance to kill Minami.

"Fuck! We have a Hyuuga! How the _hell_ did that happen, goddamn it!?"

"I'll _handle_ him, Himiko." Neji twisted, eyes wide and glowing phosphorous white. "Kill the kids."

The jounin materialized inside Neji's Hakke, too fast to do anything. He blocked with a burst of chakra only to feel the blade slice through it and bite his palm. The man's katana blade crackled now with a sparkling edge of blue. An extra two razor sharp centimeters of chakra blade added to the width, so sharp he'd barely felt it knife his hand open. _'Wind type. Shit, he's using the same style as Sarutobi-sempai.' _The Hyuuga fell back, driven into retreat, evading the wicked glitter of silver death, ribbons of killer light that streaked through his Byakugan like after-image. Three Kage Bunshin burst out of the long grass and suddenly Neji was surrounded.

Bleeding now, he flew into a series of Body Flickers, one after the other after the other, trying to trick his way into being lost among the illusion. He was bending and twisting, rolling up and bending over backward and lashing out in all directions. _Bamf_! _Bamf_! The clones burst into smoke and dust all around him. Neji used Bunshin, masked his chakra, planted false chakra signals on his clones and they were _not falling for any of it _–!

Then fire burst through his skull and Neji hit the ground, puking before he even recognized what happened.

"Neji-sensei!?"

"Hyuuga-sempai?"

"I'm fine! Don't stop!" Neji shouted, spitting bile and vomit.

He wiped his mouth and forced himself up, legs prickling with un-readiness, equilibrium all spun out to hell. He was aware that he was crying; eyes burnt full of sodium flavored tears that would not stop running but did not affect his bloodline's ability to see. But _fuck_ his eyes were on _fire_.

His genin were ganging up on the wounded chuunin, but having a hard time of it. The woman was blasting the field apart with devastating Douton ninjutsu and if Neji didn't get over there _now_ –! The jounin slammed the hilt of his katana into Neji's temple, caught him up in around the middle and _threw_ him the opposite direction. ("No, you fucking don't," he said vengefully. "You deal with me first.") Neji hit the ground hard, wind slammed from his lungs and twisted adroitly up and felt a swath of cold bright pain open the flesh on his ribs. He ducked and flipped back, spun around to face his opponent.

He didn't have the chakra for this.

They'd just come out the Stone Country mission and this guy was as strong as Asuma.

Even as he fought for his life, pulses of heat throbbed through his head; scarring cherry-red fire through the front of his skull. His chakra sputtered through his system in gelatinous pops and bursts. It rushed into his head in uncontrollable surges, pooled hot behind his retinas – _'Fuck! No. Not now!'_ – building heat like a pressure cooker. Itachi's goddamn jutsu taking him, harder than it ever had before. Minami and Nishi were wrapped in some kind of living plant jutsu, the grass under their feet reaching up to wrap their skinny ankles, holding them down. They couldn't move. He had to –

And that's when his Cage Seal released.

Neji actually screamed this time, dropping to his knees and kneeling there blind to everything but the heat and the darkness. The juin on his forehead glowed white-hot, cauterizing his eyes and his mind and he was clutching his face, just _screaming_.

"_Minami-nee-chan!_"

"_Sensei_!"

_The world was burning red and black…_

_**- - -**_

"_Neji-nii-san."_

_Her slender hands rest on his shoulders; palms low on the back of his neck – too low, intentionally low – and he can't stop the shudder that moves through him, secret and unwilling as an earthquake under water. Fingertips ghost down his arms; her mouth moves down the nape of his neck; she whispers through his shirt against the first thoracic vertebrae and makes him shiver like he doesn't want to. Hinata would never touch him like this. Never in his blind spot: the only vulnerable place on his body. She would never…_

"_You're not here," he tells the non-entity. "You've never been here."_

"_And does that comfort you?" she whispers. "Does it change what you have done?"_

"_Stop this jutsu."_

"_Answer my question. Does the fact this isn't real change how you felt when you did it?"_

"_You forced…" He stops. "I wouldn't do that."_

"_You did once," she points out. "You tried. Do you not love me now out of penitence for that?"_

"_That's not why," he cries and his voice is swallowed by the silence all around him, the tomb of soundless air he's created. "That's not true."_

"_Oh cousin," she says sadly, wrapping her arms around him from behind, holding him so close he can feel her heart beating against his back, her timid, shifting chakra engulfing him. She is coolness and serenity. Of all the Hyuuga, she felt the most like water when she was near. She's always felt like water running through him and she feels like water now, liquid currents sliding through the mesh of his senses like a river through a net. She holds him and kisses the place where his hair meets his skin, just behind his ear. "You killed me once. You've killed me twice. You'll kill me many, many more times before I let you go."_

_Her mouth breathes sparks and filthy steam against his neck, leaves burns down his shoulder._

"_You'll kill me, until you hate me, nii-san."_

_**- - -**_

And suddenly the juin seal shattered and he was the static center of the world. The circle of his divination arrayed at his feet in all directions like a compass drawn in light and calligraphy but he was the only magnetic pull in existence, standing motionless at the centre while everything else revolved slowly around him. Neji was the focal point of this universe and everything and everyone around him was just caught in his orbit – and he could knock them the fuck out of it.

The chuunin didn't have time to realize she was dead before she was, her own tanto blade rammed through her throat. The Hyuuga suddenly and inconceivably _in front of her_ – no longer on the other side of the field but having suddenly fucking _appeared_, he twisted the blade from her hand and sheathed it in the warm dark of her trachea. Neji let her drop. It was easy. The Byakugan tore down the walls of opaque and laid the world bare in light and chakra and kinetic motion. Grabbing up Time and pinning it still before him. Stopping her had been easy because he'd already seen her defense, split seconds before she made it.

He was aware of a great pressure inside his head, chakra. It coiled and twisted inside the hollow of his eyes, building and burning inside his head. The jounin captain was attacking him, coming at him from all sides so fast the become little more than blurs, tufts of grass bursting where his feet touched, no other sign of his passing save the whispering hiss of mass moving through air too fast too follow. But Neji didn't have to move. He waited. _Hiss_! Pivoted left, knocked the man's blade away, grabbing up the chakra in his katana and pushing it away with the flat of his palm. He resumed the Juuken stance and waited. _Hiss! Crack_! A blow to the knee this time. A curse and he was gone again. Neji waited.

"What the fuck are you?" whispered the jounin.

"You're in my divination," Neji murmured. "I can see you clearly."

The flicker of motion came from his right. He spun. _Crack!_ The heel of Neji's hand slammed into the jounin's jaw, shattering bone and teeth –! And Neji felt something inside his head _shift_. There was pain, fleeting and hot inside him and through his Byakugan, hotter and hotter, unbearably fucking hot –! Then it was gone. Released as bolt of light twisting through the air like a crazy bottle rocket, it spiraled through his Byakugan. It slammed into the jounin and Neji saw his chakra freeze inside his pathways. His jutsu failed.

_Shh-crack_! Neji's chakra laden hands grabbed and snapped the now lightless katana blade like plastic. He saw the jounin's deep grey eyes fall on him, wide and awed – Neji spun, struck out. _Crunch_! A sick wet sound of grinding and impact. Neji's straight kick shattered his nose and drove shards of bone and calcium deep into the man's brain. The glow of chakra blackened to nothing. He was gone and the grass whispered over the body. Neji shuddered. His hands bled blood and chakra. His head was full of chakra, chakra under his clothes and in his mouth. He felt that there was nothing holding him back, nothing in the world… Finally, he could _see_.

Then the Cage Seal clamped down and blinded him. It burned into the bone across his forehead and he was stripped empty and raw, hollowed so utterly he decided he was dying. He'd killed himself, the seal was killing him and he was just dying. Without anything to hold him up, he fell.

"Neji-sensei!" Nishi's voice chased him into the cold dark.

"Shit," wept Tachi somewhere.

'_Hanabi…I'm so sorry.'_

"Nishi," Minami's voice echoed, "what's wrong with his _eyes_?"

**Author's Note:**

_Cliffhanger! Wooo!_


	15. Nostophobia

Nostophobia

* * *

_:fear of returning home_

* * *

_A throbbing flash of fire and air goes off inside his head. There is exploding shrapnel in his eyes and Neji screams because of it. The pain bursts through him hard enough to shock his nervous system numb, rip maliciously through into the back of his optic nerve, dig into the back of his eyes, gush into his brain and threaten to burst out his skull. All he can think is how it's never hurt like this, how it feels like there are spider web fractures spreading though his skull. His thoughts slur together in an animal panic of instinctive pain and reactive horror and _fuckjustturnitoffbeforeIcan'tbreathe_ –_

_Kabuto has his hand over Neji's forehead; glowing bright green, smelling like crushed aloe plants and looking down at him through the bright white glow of his spectacles. The soft neon lime of his chakra turns the snow of his hair a mossy color, makes his skin a sickly marine hue. Neji can feel the cool penetration of chakra pushing into his head, forcing its way through the lines of ink and old anchoring points like roots thrusting into soil. It trickles like sea water into him, invading the network of his chakra system in an injection of ice, dousing the fire in his blood and in his brain until he can finally think and...it's worse. It's so much _worse_._

"_Kabuto…stop."_

"_Relax, Neji-kun."_

"_No. Stop _now_."_

"_I'm afraid not."_

_Another spike of chakra, acrid and alive, burning through, and Neji screams. The restraints are unexpected and terrifying and he wildly throws himself against them, bucking and writhing with animal desperation. He slams back against the stiff examination table cushion, kicks and yanks violently as straps and buckles dig in at his wrists and elbows. The Yakushi shoves his head back, presses a palm of hot medical ninjutsu into his brain and into his belly and a fresh scream works out of him. The heat spreads inside him, like an unnatural infestation of ivy coiling into his guts and laying down baby shoots of itself within his stomach. He can feel it taking root inside him and it's unbearable, he can't even move. He can't even breathe._

_Worse, there is something _writhing_ inside his skull. There is a living thing, a fucking tentacled invertebrate slithering through his brain, coated in gasoline and burning a path of fire through his gray matter, coiling behind his eyes and his thoughts and all he can do is scream._

"_It's okay, Neji-kun. Just think about something else. I'll be finished soon."_

"_Get it out! Get it out of me!"_

"_I know what it feels like, but you have to bear with me. Neji! You can't move. Your juin seal is still active."_

"_It's inside my head!"_

"_It's the Cage Seal. It's degenerating. You have to let me stabilize it."_

"_It's inside my fucking skull! It's in my eyes!"_

"_This won't work. I'm going to try a fuin before the damage progresses any farther."_

"_Kill me."_

"_He's going into shock," Kabuto tells someone coolly, pinning the Hyuuga down. "Fetch a sedative."_

"Kill me_!"_

"_The pain is making him psychotic. Hold his head."_

"_Please, just get it out! _Just tear them out_! I'll do _anything_! Just make it…"_

_**- - -**_

The rain finally stopped the first of February. It had rained all through December and the end of January. It hadn't snowed this year, but in Konoha snow came only sparingly and as a surprise to those who lived there. The weather, so quick to turn to the heat and humidity so familiar to it, had grown balmy and warm already and a sticky thickness hung in the air. It made heavy clothing unbearable and missions to cooler climes of foreign countries increasingly sought after. Much had happened in those past four months, enough to warrant the notice of just about anyone.

Akatsuki was on the move, it had been said these past months. ANBU Intel from all countries pointed to some shadow faction ten ninja strong and constantly in motion at the fringes of Fire Country attention. There had been fights, they said; earth shaking, sky moving battles in the deep wastelands, and in the far oceans, and the ice caps of the northern regions. Battles fought between great monsters – living mountains of ice and fire and earth and chakra that moved the continental plates of whole countries, or so they said – and men garbed in cloaks of red cloud and shadow. The monsters vanished, one by one from the rumors of their lands and Akatsuki was always on the move.

Tsunade had been content to let them work their scheme, keep an eye out lest they choose to involve themselves with her own Hidden Village, or finally make their move on the Kyuubi jinchuuriki, their own Number One Hyperactive Ninja. Uzumaki Naruto had returned to Konoha in late June. Jiraya's return had provided some relief; just the knowledge that the Hidden Leaf was once again populated by two of the Sennin eased the anxieties of all Konoha shinobi.

And then the Kazekage was taken.

Naruto, in fine form as always, was in the thick of it. Tsunade drank more than she probably should have given the circumstances and deployed what remained of Team Guy to aid Team Kakashi in the mission to rescue Wind Country's beloved leader, jinchuuriki, the Godaime Garra of the Desert. Konoha had no shinobi to spare during this crisis; almost all the Akimichi and Nara clans had been deployed on various guerrilla missions again the Rock. The Hyuuga were spread thin watching the country borders and maintaining inner-village security. The Aburame, Inuzuka, and Yamanaka clans had been dispersed on various assignments through out the surrounding countries. Jounin were in and out of the village quick as they could be patched up, paid and redeployed. ANBU was busy was the rumor. Though doing what, no one but Tsunade-sama herself could say.

Konohagakure had only just now recovered from the disastrous conflict three years since with Orochimaru, the one-man genocide, murderer of the Third, traitor to everyone and everything the Leaf had ever known. Their walls were only just now rebuilt at last to full strength. Their economy pulled from the brink. Life returning to normal. They were only just now able to move against Akatsuki and Tsunade had waited, impatient and irate, for the day to come. Had waited the better part of three years to have a standing army strong enough, black ops intricate and secret enough, young clan geniuses mature enough to finally act.

Konohakagure had been very busy these past four months; there had been no time for anything.

It had been one-hundred-eighteen days since Hyuuga Neji took his last mission.

It wasn't a stretch to say only a handful of people took notice. By people, of course, the entirety of the Hyuuga branch must be excluded, as their grievances have never counted for anything much in Konoha.

- - -

The thief came in over the east wall, throwing himself up the stucco and over the top in a single soundless motion. He landed in the head house gardens and entered through one of the side doors, moving through the halls with the self assurance of one who knew exactly where he was going… who'd been in the Hyuuga head house before, probably knew the location of the cookie jars, toilet paper and creaky floorboards. He moved silently, stopping only once as someone inside one of the rooms stirred briefly. Then he quietly tossed himself through a high window, diffused the chakra seals that locked it with soundless ease and slipped inside.

Hiashi let the thief do this without raising the alarm because he wanted to know what he was after.

He watched as the thief entered the Hyuuga records room, watched as he ignored the jutsu manuscripts, the medical files, the secrets and the sacred sealing scrolls and instead went straight for the clan's history archive.

He scanned the shelves briefly, grabbed a single scroll cylinder from the rack – he checked its date briefly – and strode out into the main courtyard where ten of the head family's finest Juuken watchmen waited for him. He did not seem surprised nor, most importantly, alarmed. He wore traditional black shinobi attire, no body armor, weapons, or hidden summoning scrolls. No shuriken, no kunai, no garroting wire, or blast notes. He was completely unarmed. The only holster he carried was a tube of stiff leather strapped between his shoulder blades and it was into this carrier that he slid the single scroll he'd stolen and snapped the clasp. Then he walked out to meet them.

The thief's chakra flow, to Hiashi's knowing eyes, was clean and bright; slightly too complex for Hyuuga tastes, but wired through his body in such a way that the Hyuuga head felt the growth wasn't…natural. He wore a black face mask across his lower face. His eyes were hidden in a secondary swath of dark sealing cloth, knotted in a neat ribbon of inactive fuinjutsu script – the kind that made it impossible to track chakra coils through – as though there were something underneath that needed binding.

The thief shifted and raised his hands in a posture _remarkably_ like Juuken. He held himself too loosely, his hands too relaxed, his balance off-kilter, but it was a close mimicry, enough to be insulting. Several of the Hyuuga gathered stirred in disbelief; glancing discretely at one another (that being a Hyuuga specialty) they wondered at the impudence of this burglar.

Then, without preamble, he threw himself at the first three Hyuuga nearest him.

If they were suspicious that he happened to pick the three strongest first, they didn't show it.

He ducked the first flurry and deflected the next with a one-handed sweep that knocked Hyuuga Haruki's arms wide and opened his guard to a rib-crushing axe-kick. Haruki absorbed the blow, but the force knocked him back. Hiashi frowned. Losing no momentum, the thief flipped forward, somersaulted into a whirlwind spinning kick. He missed, landed, and hooked his foot around Hyuuga Hyromi's ankle, yanking him off his balance. The three Hyuuga swarmed him and he met them with skill equal to the task. Like a cat as much as a martial artist, the intruder lashed out with a bewildering blend of taijutsu styles. The previously off-kilter set of his stance became a strange fulcrum on which he spun, whipping his body into a furious halting rotation that never ceased to flow, to shift from one stance seamlessly into another, reversing out of a poor position and into a counter.

In the course of less than sixty seconds Hiashi had seen at least four recognizable schools of martial art, slip sliding one to the other with as much warning as whiplash; one style was undoubtedly that of the Gentle Fist. His hands flashed in a blurring wall of defensive deflection Juuken one moment, the next he'd back-flip and whip his heel into someone's jaw, grabbing the nearest Hyuuga and throwing their face into his knee with bone shattering force. Then he was back to his variation Gentle First, spinning and bending like an optical illusion among the flurry of chakra laden hands, slapping them away like paper airplanes in the air around him. He used no chakra in his blows, only the katas, but that did not unmake its effect.

Namely, that Haruki and Hyromi were being completely neutralized by this crazy cocktail mix of fighting styles.

In the end, they both fell victim to some shish-slash, 360 degree spinning kick that caught the brothers simultaneously under the chin and sent them crashing into the buildings around them. Hitomi came at him then; arguably one of the best Juuken users in the head family, she was even capable of the Hakkeshou Kaiten and often it was her task to keep even Hiashi on his toes from time to time. Her milky eyes flew wide, however, when her opponent met her hit for hit with one-hundred-ten percent pure Hyuuga-style Gentle Fist. He was fast. He had no fear of the hissing flares of chakra in her hands.

Finally, after a fifteen-second run where neither of them made any progress against one another whatsoever, she withdrew. To anyone outside the Hyuuga clan, she might have appeared unfazed, to Hiashi and the other Byakugan users, she looked completely floored.

"Hiashi-sama," murmured Hyuuga Hebi softly from his left. "This ninja…"

"I saw."

The thief didn't wait for the next salvo; he leapt up the side of the nearest building and darted away across the roof.

"Follow him! Don't let him escape!"

As one, the Hyuuga took off after the intruder, hurdling up and over the roofs and vanishing over the walls of the estate. Through the Byakugan, the intruder's chakra burned phosphorescent bright, like a motion-blur of neon leaping and bounding across the flattops of Konoha. Beside him, Hiashi could hear the voice of Hyuuga Hebi radioing the alert to HQ. Hebi was a branch family active, a ranking jounin and had once been plied for ANBU by the Sandaime. He was denied the position of course, dark ops being too far outside Hyuuga authority and too far within the Hokage's personal command, but he served just as effectively within the clan. Hiashi relied on him to be competent and he seldom failed to be.

"Hiashi-sama, I've raised the alarm." Hebi drew even with him, eyes cast out, Byakugan active. While the man lacked accuracy in his Juuken, his eyes had an impressive range, one that matched most head family members. He was no doubt watching the outcome of the chase. "They've deployed a jounin."

"_A_ jounin?" Hiashi inquired sharply. "They are aware that our best shinboi are already on missions? We could only spare Hitomi and our security squad."

Hebi didn't look away from the horizon. "Apparently, the copy-nin happened to be coming in from a mission."

"Ah. Well, then."

_**- - -**_

"_Do you know the story behind the Cage Seal, Neji-kun?"_

_Takon was sounding particularly pleased with himself today and that alone made Neji suspicious as hell. Among other things, the white-haired replicator had established himself an unbroken reputation for being completely apathetic to everything and everyone with the sole exception of whomever he was presently tormenting. To those people he paid the most special and intimate kinds of attention, the kind of detailed delight Ibiki would have attributed to 'a natural' in his profession. Neji had seen his share of 'natural's from the Sound. Kidomaru had been one. Kabuto another. _

_Kabuto had his own particular brand of manipulation, however; an opaque and utterly inscrutable kind of verbal hypnotism that worked and dealt in subtle devastating currencies of suggestion and self-doubt. The physician made you feel naked and dissected and laid wide open; like he was inside you or had been there, seen it, taken some pictures and been unimpressed. He made you think he knew you. The greatest mentalist Neji had ever met and it was the doctor's calculated logic that paralyzed him so fully _

_Takon, however, was none of that kind of subtle. He was a manipulator, yes, but he worked with the more malleable and tangible materials. He handled blood and bone and bodies; sculpted the thing he wanted to affect from the fears, facts, and many faceted fallacies of the men and women he worked with and Neji had observed even Sasuke to give him a kind of penetrating look of loathing above the usual. He had a knack for putting a finger on exactly what it was that made others bare their teeth or recoil into themselves like poked snails into their curlicue shell. _

"_Well? You were spouting off all that history to Mai. Do you know it or not?"_

"_Every Hyuuga is taught the history of the seal."_

"_That's a bit fucked up."_

"_Be quiet, Takon."_

_The Sound-nin grinned and leaned down close to his ear. "I'll bet I know the real story behind your Cage Seal. Where it really came from."_

"_Fuck you."_

"_You know, you've got a bit of a foul mouth on you, Hyuuga. That's not very dignified for a noble clan born brat."_

"_I repeat, fuck you. Are you going to be this persistent all night or will you shut up long enough to get this mission done?"_

"_Tell me your version, Hyuuga and I'll tell you mine. Let's see how they compare."_

"_No. I'm not playing into your game. I'm more than aware of the fact my clan lies. It's part of who and what we are and don't act like you know something about us that I don't. You're not one of us."_

"_I don't profess that I am, little one," said Takon, all honey smooth and sweet as formaldehyde. His smile was a silver bright, Cheshire crescent cut. "But don't you wonder who it is I am? Not who I'm not, that's a very easy thing to decide, what I'm not. But what I am is far more interesting, least far as you and I are concerned."_

_Neji didn't remember his hand jumping to the Sound-nin's jugular or summoning the dose of wintergreen lethal energy to his fingertips. He didn't turn his head to meet the other ninja's gaze, he didn't need to anymore, true Hyuuga habit. "I do not care."_

"_You do." Takon pushed his hand down gently. "S'why I'm telling you. Didn't you wonder? An ability like mine, why you'd never heard of it."_

"_Not in particular, no."_

"_Bit of history. Two clans in the Wind Country, before it was ever the Hidden Sand. You talked about them. Two clans the Hyuuga destroyed, just them by their lonesome standing in the fire of that hatred and that holocaust. We have the complete records, my clan. By which I mean I have the records. It was me and my little brothers till you and yours killed them as children, but that's a bit of history we don't need to review. What's very important to remember, what applies to you, is the measures that your clan took…" Takon's smile was cloying, ginger. "Do you know what a Hyuuga Hawk is, Neji? A Nightingale?" _

_Neji didn't look up. Takon crouched close by, fiddling with a stray kunai, thumbing the edge. _

"_Not terms a third generation Hyuuga would know," he said, "given what history you've been fed, what discourse they've marginalized to have their peace. A Hawk is a soldier, Neji, the best kind of soldier because they have nothing to lose. True believers. I never saw one, but the stories my elders used to tell, ah…you'd think they were ghosts." Takon flipped the kunai spinning. "In those days, the Nightingales sent their Hawks and we died. Simple as that. Given, so did you, but not in so great the numbers we did. It was, point of fact, a brilliant strategy. More so even after the war."_

"_I don't know what you're –" Neji began, but Takon cut him off. _

_He shoved __his palm into Neji's collarbone, against the lines of the Serpent Seal. The pressure sent an instant and indefinable tremor of sensation through Neji's body. Like a wash of marbles was bumping down inside his skeleton, or his skin was retightening itself around his joints and muscles. Then he shoved his chakra into the Leaf-nin. _

_The cursed mark roared to life and Neji slammed backward, gasping and gritting his teeth to keep the raging swarms of synethensia from bursting out of him. There were…feelings, impressions of pain, of pleasure, of pressure, of pins and needles, poison, paralysis and all rushing him in uncoordinated droves of confusion. Every muscle in his body was seizing up. He was doubled up on himself, his breath bottled and blockaded up inside his chest like the best secret in his dystopia of pain-but-not-exactly. Then it stopped and his muscles melted beneath his skin and he couldn't see straight because his head was just spinning, reeling, launched out into the stratosphere of his awareness. _

_Then it stopped and he was on his knees, hair hanging and pooling on the floor beneath his face, gasping into the stone._

_Takon was flipping through his manga again. Volume three of the Tengu Myth series. _

"_Of course you don't," sighed the jounin. "You're a half-breed genetic fuck-up son of a meat shield branch house member. Why the fuck would they tell you anything?" He sighed and left Neji crouched there. "In fact, I'm through. You finish the mission. You're just another suicide bird, after all."_

_**- - -**_

'_God, I hate the Rain.'_

"Kakashi-san."

'_It never fails. No matter how many water proofing jutsu I use, somehow the ink will always run.'_

"Kakashi."

'_That page was a particular favorite of mine…'_

"Kakashi, you bastard, there's an enemy-nin attacking the Hyuuga estate –"

"Well, that's not very smart of him…" muttered the copy ninja absently.

"– and he's beat the shit out of their security squad."

The damp jounin looked up from his slightly water damaged porn and eyed the messenger – a very somnolent and grumpy looking Genma – as though he'd never seen the man and was trying to decide who'd let him into the check-in lobby. Ten minutes ago, he'd finally arrived at this check-in lobby; a goal he'd worked very hard to accomplish without putting anymore of his life, limbs, or reading material at risk. Two weeks ago, he'd made an effort to point out that a mission of this particular caliber would probably be best left to some more deserving member of ANBU – "Like one that's not retired for example." – maybe several of them, a team of them. Just not him by himself right now, thanks.

Tsunade just gave him a _look_, the kind known to splinter men's souls (Kakashi was okay, his soul was of a particularly hardy sort) and told him if thought there was someone else more suited to an A-class reconnaissance mission deep into Akatsuki infiltrated territory then he was free to make a list and hand them the mission specs. Then she'd emphasized the danger in which he'd placed himself by unearthing a particularly large bottle of hard sake, popping the cork at his head, and drinking more than most of it in a single go; effectively ending the argument. Not even Kakashi dared a drunken Sennin, no matter how severely she chose to fuck with his weekends.

Genma had yet to remove himself and the two ninja stared at each other across the puddle of Rain Country water that Kakashi had managed to hike with him (all three gallons of it in his uniform the entire way from Kirigakure, naturally) to Konoha. If the agitated clicking was any indication – and it was, Genma rolled the sebon with his tongue when on edge – the special jounin was looking for some kind of immediate reaction. The younger man blinked. Genma chewed his senbon furiously. Kakashi, after some consideration, lowered his book to his knee and gave this some thought.

"Oh, you mean –?"

"_Go_, you lazy fuck!" Genma snarled.

Kakashi sighed and handed the ruined volume to the irritable shinobi. "Hold this. I'll be back in a minute."

"Ugh."

Despite himself, the poison specialist was trying his damnedest not to look embarrassed as the copy-nin took off and left him with a wet smut novel. Shiranui Genma, to those that knew him well, was amiable and generally easy-going. To those who delighted in bugging him – i.e.: Hatake Kakashi – he was foul-mouthed and terse to the point of monosyllabic (save for those especially wordy gouts of scathing profanity, in which case he became absolutely and spectacularly long-winded, poetic even.) That Kakashi had elected to torment Genma out off all the available ninja was something of an office mystery and no one could come up with a defendable reason why the two didn't like each other. Probably for the best.

"Hatake-san." A Hyuuga leapt over an adjacent roof and drew even with him. "The thief is unarmed and carries a clan scroll from our vaults. He's overpowered several of our better available fighters. His taijutsu seems to be his specialty; designed specifically against the Juuken style. His live capture would be best if it can be managed."

"Chakra capacity?"

"Nothing extraordinary. But nothing to scorn either."

"He's unarmed. Really?"

The Hyuuga gave him a look to suggest to him the level of his incompetence and the copy-nin sighed. Quite simply, it was just not going to be a good night tonight. He gave the Hyuuga instructions to keep his men back, a terse salute, then snapped under the threshold of perception to overtake his quarry. Kakashi hooked his trajectory around the ninja to appear suddenly – and, yeah, pretty damn impressively – in front of the intruder who pulled up hard and leapt back with an unmistakable ripple of surprise running through his body. The copy-nin waved.

"Yo. I hear you're stealing things," he remarked conversational-like. "'Fraid that's not 'zactly kosher."

"You," said the intruder, in the husky, slightly muffled voice of a young man, "are supposed to be in the Rain. You weren't here ten minutes ago."

Kakashi shrugged. "I got back early. And that's a very interesting trick. How did you know I wasn't here ten minutes ago?"

The thief backed up, braced, then Body Flickered. Chakra swept through his left eye and Kakashi tracked the substitution; a reverse teleportation, the thief doubled back, finished by shooting off in completely the opposite direction than the one he'd first set off in. There was a hint of genjutsu in the move, a flicker of hallucinogenic light and motion to make anyone think they'd spotted the real thing streaking off in yet another direction. Tricky fucker, he'd give him that. Nevertheless, Kakashi's fist nearly plowed through the thief's head when the copy-nin matched his move and cut him off at the pass two roofs over. The kid hissed, kicked back and reverse tumbled down the side of the clay-shingled slant before catching himself and flipping adroitly back to his feet.

"You," said Kakashi to the startled intruder, "are not faster than I am. That move belongs to someone far better than you."

The thief took his advice by attacking him.

Curious as to what kind of style had the ability to neutralize Konoha's secret white-eyed human weaponry, Kakashi let the intruder engage. He hit him at speed, a flurry of fists that melted into thrown elbows, vital-strikes, then spine-shattering spinning kicks that ripped the air in two with their passing, tearing holes in the atmosphere. The Sharingan picked out the camera flash flickers of his hands as they knifed toward kill points, tracked their reaction times as they swatted his blows away like fruit flies. It was a tricky style to be sure; Kakashi hadn't seen anything like it before. Through the Sharingan, the thief moved in strategic patterns of the erratic; one moment free-fall tumbling, dropping like a ragdoll into a sloppy somersault, tripping and stumbling forward through a half-drunken slip… only to immediately launch out the momentum of his roll into intricate champloo-style Juuken.

'_He…moves a bit like Guy.' _A blow sliced past Kakashi's cheek, ripped a tear in the cloth near his jaw line. _'But that's not the trick. This one has an ace. You don't attack the Hyuuga unarmed without an ace.'_

The copy-nin disengaged and leapt back, hands flashing through a series of signs. The resulting jutsu had the effect of warping the clay shingles under the thief back to their slick water-liquid state, slithering amorphous tentacles closing over his ankles and sucking him down, hardening instantaneously back to fired stone. The kid twisted once, the clay shattered as if set upon by a firecracker, and he launched into another spinning kick so wild, Kakashi threw himself wide because his Sharingan was telling him – _'Clever fucking brat.'_ – that it was coming from three different directions. He landed free. The thief landed on his hands and knees, crouched there like an animal and lifted his head sharply.

"That kind of attitude is bound to get you killed and not in a nice way," Kakashi warned the thief laconically, brushing clay off his vest. "Now why don't you hand over the Hyuuga's stuff and surrender?"

The thief made another break for the village wall but Kakashi was there instantly. Stopped, the thief threw himself into a fast-forward serpentine attack, punched through his defense and plowed a knee into the Leaf-nin's face…only to meet a shell of mist and chakra that exploded into smoke. The real Kakashi reappeared behind the thief from the roof he'd actually body flickered to. It was impossible that the thief saw him coming, more impossible that he might sense all six of the kunai bulleting for his back, but impossible was shit because the thief half spun and swiped them away with his bare hand; kunai scattered as if blown off by an unseen burst of air. Kakashi blinked and decided that was a very, _very_ interesting trick. He barely got over his surprise in time to grab the back of the kid's shirt and yank him back down as he darted away again.

"Ah, wait up."

The thief spun and took a swipe at his kidney.

Kakashi swatted the attack aside. "Stop that. Cool trick for a brat."

The thief tried to run, Kakashi blocked him, shoved him back.

"Wanna show it to me again?"

With more than some desperation the thief tried to run again, body-flickering through a cloud of Bunshin and darting for an adjacent roof…but Kakashi snatched his ankle and tugged him back like a jack-in-the box interrupted. (An arched brow: "Who the hell you do think I am, kid?") Finally, about the fourth time at this, the thief spun with a snarled "Fuck you, copy-nin!" abruptly switched stances and lashed an open palm at his throat. The Sharingan laid the danger bare in glowing hot nephrite, the thief's palms charged with vital fire seconds before knifing past Kakashi's ribs and exploding out. The force of the blow knocked him sideways, sent a burst of peppermint fire blossoming through the muscles under his right arm.

'_And there,' _thought Kakashi,_ 'is the ace.'_

The copy-nin fissured into five Kage Bunshin, each of which unleashed a jutsu with simultaneous lethality – one a barrage of kunai, a dose of mid-level genjutsu, and exploding tags followed by a nasty Katon fire ball. Given those options, the thief threw up a single hand sign and the script across his blindfold burned alive, chakra flooding the lines of ink like veins of blood, a transfusion of energy that coiled back into some optical deus ex machine and without missing a beat the thief charged – fucking head on _charged_ – the Katon and threw a chakra infused punch that blew it, the cloud of kunai, and all the exploding tags into oblivion and the stratosphere.

A rain of hot metal littered the rooftops. The heat charred the cloth from his wrist to shoulder, seared the thief's arm, incinerating the paper seal across his eyes to ash and for a split second Kakashi met his opponent's gaze – moon-bright disks of shattered mirror white. Pale irises cracked through, like some great internal earthquake had eroded and chipped the white enamel off a matte black undercoat. The copy-nin was struck first by the strangeness of that, of those broken mirror eyes, of their familiarity, and their engrained youthful terror. He was struck secondly – and perhaps more profoundly, by the realization that the kid's irises were spinning.

Like a broken mirror wheel.

Then the ace – the real ace – triggered. A burst of eye-to-eye doujutsu that Kakashi hadn't had reason to suspect lay behind that panic-riddle stare and a phantom heat ripped through the copy-nin's skull. Subtle warm energy inside his brain, like someone opening an oven behind his forehead and Obito's Sharingan suddenly, abruptly, went dark for the first time in twenty-six years. Later that night when the Hyuuga demanded angrily why he'd failed to apprehend the intruder, the disheveled copy-nin retorted very calmly:

"He had one hell of an ace up his sleeve."

And he decided he'd better have a chat with Tsunade-hime in private.

- - -

That night, in the east base of Otogakure, a white-haired Sound-nin waited patiently for the return of a slightly charred, black garbed shinobi who appeared soundless as a disgruntled shadow and strode past him. Takon grinned crookedly at the injured assassin.

"So, what's the verdict?"

Hyuuga Neji threw the sooty scroll at the other ninja, not looking at him.

"They lied to us."

He vanished inside the compound, darkness engulfing him as he did.

"Again."

_**Author's Note:**_

_Lordy lord. It's been a while and this shit's getting real. Anyway, I've just started college and classes are now kicking my ass up and down the boardwalk. Love to Lellian for editing. Love to you lovely readers. Reviews spur me on through adversity so be kind and leave a friendly (or unfriendly) word to two. Toodles_.


	16. Eleutherophobia

Eleutherophobia

* * *

_:fear of freedom_

* * *

There were rumors. Rumors under the other rumors that whispered across Konoha, the Leaf, the Fire Nation and its neighbors, murmurs that leaked through from the worried grapevines in the other countries and bled into theirs. The other rumors, obviously, got more attention. Akatsuki stole the spotlight. There wasn't time to think of anything else, of course, but there were still rumors. It anyone bothered to pay attention someone might have noticed that the Hyuuga and the Hokage kept arranging for private meetings. And while that in itself wasn't odd, inviting Hatake Kakashi to attend those meetings really was. Damned if anyone could guess why. Kakashi always came out of the board room looking pissed off and hateful (which is too say he looked exactly the same as usual, except he didn't read his porn and was on time for his missions: Fulfilling the compulsive need to kill something.)

Hatake may have known something, but he was suddenly far too busy with missions to talk about it.

There were rumors inside the rumors of Akatsuki, gossip within the gossip of war and worry. If ANBU Intel had been looking for a pattern, they might have noticed a similarity in some of their reports. An assassination in the Rain was foiled when their troop found themselves inexplicably unable to perform any jutsu and as a result the targeted daimyo completed a trade agreement with a Sound representative. A week later, a jounin scout in the Lightening Country was intercepted by a Sound-nin who stopped him from attacking a Konoha chuunin team. The Soundie, apparently, stopped the jounin with his _eyes_. There was a thief who stole records from the Sand Village archives by paralyzing all the sentries on duty. There was a series of assassinations, same MO. Clean. Lethal. Anonymous.

From a collection of over twenty eight reports all over the nations only two facts held true.

"He uses his eyes to stop you."

And:

"Don't let him touch you."

- - -

Neji woke up with blood in his mouth and static in his skull.

The shift from sleeping to waking involved such sudden, sickening redefinitions of his world that every waking brought with it nausea and pain so terrible it reached down inside him and tore him inside out each time. He fell asleep and fell through color and macabre night terrors so intense he came to bleeding where he'd bitten through his tongue. He ground the inside of his cheek to raw hamburger, spitting salt and sugar fluid and vomiting up water, vomiting up air, vomiting up fire and the acid Molotov cocktail of psychotropics and painkillers that Kabuto forced down his throat.

Hyuuga Neji, in fleeting moments rare as blue diamonds, was aware that he'd gone mad. This he knew; one nugget of certainty in the raging sea of watercolor chaos that was his mind, solid and sure for the span of a second before melting like a sugar crystal and he was lost in the maze of his madness once again. Distantly, he knew that his thoughts should not shatter at the mere suggestion of being analyzed. He knew there should not have been bands of light and butterfly wings in his eyes. There should not be a caricature of Uchiha Itachi standing in the corner of his peripheral every time he came back thrashing to consciousness.

He knew, somehow, somewhere, in his head, something was not aligned.

All had become non sequitur.

The world splintered under his fingertips then crawled inside his skull in Technicolor and raped every crevasse of his brain until there wasn't anything left inside him untouched by everything that was supposed to be outside him. He couldn't stop seeing everything. Kabuto came into his room several times an hour and told him so. Takon came into his room several times a day and told him so. Itachi came into his head several times a minute and told him so. Obviously, this concerned him a lot more than any Sound-nin and Neji dreaded every half-waking moment. He dreaded the new terrible truths pouring into him from hidden recesses of his head that he'd not known were there until his seal shattered.

_You are seeing too much_, they told him, _and you can't shut it off because your clan's precious Cage Seal, their prized fucking piece of pretentious self-insurance, has gone nuclear and flipped some super stereophonic visual system in your brain to permanent 'ON'._

"Your eyes are evolving," Itachi told him, standing on the ceiling, dressed in jeans and Rock Lee's favorite T-shirt, hands in his pockets, face the same terrifying glassy-eyed mask of crafted madness. "The Cage Seal is designed for binding the Byakugan. It's a specific design. Your eyes were a close match when you were a child, but now they want to change and the shift is causing intermittent seal release as it dislodges the chakra anchors."

Neji tried to tell him that was ridiculous. He'd been tested all his life. The clans had run him through the scientific wringer and he was negative for the Sharingan gene. Negative. It would not manifest. They'd told him this over and over. He was Hyuuga. He was theirs. Neji tried to articulate this, but all that got out was a low, despairing moan, like a wounded animal and Itachi stepped out from a patch of shadow to his left and leaned over him. Pale and disinterested, rake thin and terrible, terrible, terrible with eyes that spun sickeningly like spiral tops, like a bloody whirlpools. Neji tried to recoil, held down by leather and metal and stone straps so tight he couldn't even turn his head. He couldn't close his eyes. Itachi filled his visual cortex until he wanted to scream.

"The Byakugan is a dominant gene allele." Itachi's voice in his head drives splinters into him, pierces and poisons him. "It would suppress the phenotypic traits of the copy-wheel, but you're still a carrier. The Sharingan probably would have manifested if not for that seal clamping down on every optical chakra coil in your brain. It's a terrible thing. The head family must have done it on purpose, fearing what you might become. That's why your eyes do things they shouldn't. That's why seal activation makes you so sick. That's why you can't scream."

"Get away from me! _Get away!_ You don't know what you're talking about!"

"He's been like this," said Kabuto, who was leaning over him where Itachi had been standing, "all morning I'm afraid. The pain is more than any of my anesthesia can sooth without side effects. As you can see…the results are somewhat grotesque."

"And your suppose this has something to do with the genjutsu damage?" asked Hinata in Mai's voice, low and smoky.

"Most certainly, Mai-san. I've been closely monitoring his condition on a nightly basis. There's enough synaptic damage to kill just about any A-class jounin, given the damage was meant to kill. No, someone opened our Hyuuga's head and played merry hell, I think. Then they patched the damage with a thin mental block. I've found it – genius workmanship, by the by, Mai-san. The best I've seen for genjutsu suppressants, I'll show you sometime. The block is centered in the amygdala, boosts the affect, forces down some hormone production, boosts others. Keeps him docile as it were. Forces him to forget the events whenever conscious."

"A cognitive memory block," breathed Mai. "That's unheard of. Are you saying…?"

"Yes. Every night. Just to keep him suspicious."

"That's…simply amazing. I've love to meet the motherfucker that did this. It's exquisitely clever."

"Yes. And apparently triggered to self detonate. Ever since the seal break he's been hallucinating. I suspect whatever mental block that's been suppressing his night terrors is splintering as we speak. Most likely, once the seal is gone, he'll remember everything."

Itachi leaned over the doctor's shoulder, red eyes whirling as he looked down at the Hyuuga. "Are you ready to remember? The last lesson?"

"I'm not you," he rasped, tasting blood and salt in equal measure. "I'm not you…"

"I never said you were. _You_ did."

"Ignore it. He's probably not even aware we're in the room."

"He's looking at us."

Kabuto grinned. "Don't be so vain. Of course he's looking at us. I imagine he couldn't stop looking at us, the ceiling, the walls, the floor, even if he wanted to."

"You're eating this up," Mai laughed. "This is probably you're wet dream, doctor. A hybrid doujutsu and all to yourself." She clucked her tongue reproachfully. "Don't get too attached. Orochimaru-sama might consider him for –"

"Impossible. Neji is far too unstable a vessel at this point to say nothing of possible side effects from the hybridization. Besides, Sasuke is still the stronger option when it comes down to sheer power. Neji, however, is a creature of particular…" Kabuto fished for a word. "…subtlety. Grace, I'd say. He's been a great asset these last months and I'm not ready to give up on his usefulness yet. Certainly not while the Sound is in such a precarious position."

Hinata (No, not Hinata. It wasn't, couldn't be her.) smiled a crooked bitter smile, thoughtful in its nastiness. "So I suppose you'd hold it against me if I did something mean to your new plaything."

Kabuto sighed, guiding her off. "Mai-san. I know how you feel about the Hyuuga, but you must remember yours is not the only clan they've slaughtered…just the most recent. Takon's clan was wiped out nearly to the man by Hyuuga Hawks, after all, and they did that without any prompting from village Hokages. You can't begrudge Neji-kun his heritage. Besides," Kabuto chuckled as the two Sound-nin exited the room, "its looking like he may cast his lot with the Uchiha by the end of all this anyway. Did you see how they spin…?"

The voices faded. Neji shut his eyes. It didn't matter though. Itachi was inside his eyelids, superimposed within the dark sanctum of his skull where Neji supposed he must have always been. Since the night in the Hyuuga gardens where those kalidescope eyes caught him up, pinned him, and wove an illusion so fine he'd not realized the extent of his deception until just now. The illusion that he'd ever had any control. The illusion that all Itachi had done that night was teach him a forbidden assassin jutsu so destructive it masked the real horror.

"What did you do to me?"

"I just woke you up."

"No."

"I set you free, Neji." Those dark raging insane red eyes looked down on him, and in them Neji could see his own gaze reflected back, a mirror image of madness and mania. Itachi bent over him. Hinata bent over him. The world was shivering and shaking and gone and Neji was too tired to scream, too tired to resist. He couldn't close his eyes. "I'm going to show you a world without boundaries."

- - -

"_Stop."_

_The command hung in the air like a lonely cloud, a tiny, insubstantial breath of sound floating there in front of him and he absently reached out to touch it. The bubble of his words popped with a disgruntled burble and whizzed off like a pricked party balloon to hurl into the heavens and away. He didn't bother to watch for its progress because he'd just noticed his second cousin Hyumi standing at the end of the hall. She was dressed only in a thin under kimono and it occurred to him that a: this was no way for a member of the Hyuuga House to behave (branch or not) and c: (wait. He felt as though he'd forgotten something) it was very cold out and shouldn't she be wearing her jacket?_

_This having occurred to him, he took her jacket from the hook on the wall beside him and set off to give her the pink frilly thing that must be her coat because it simply must be, it was the only one in the hall and he was warm enough in his sweatshirt. Never mind, he didn't remember ever owning a sweatshirt. Details. Where the hell did Hyumi think she was going? Like some kind of shy ghost she'd stepped off down the adjacent hall to her left and padded away, the soft slap of her bare feet reminding him that it was freezing and he'd forgotten his own shoes in his haste to give her jacket to her. _

_Mildly annoyed, Neji set off after her at a brisk pace. _

"_Hyumi, you need your jacket," he called after her. "Get back here."_

"_There's something I have to do first," she told him from halfway down the hall. She boosted herself through a window, the long pale skin of her bare calves looking the color of skim milk and eggshell. Smooth muscle flexed beneath as she stood up on the sill and inspected the outside. A cold wind flung threads of her dark hair around her throat, fanning out in coils behind her head. "I'll be back. Hold my coat, Neji-kun?"_

"_I can't. I have a mission," he reminded her, moving to the window and standing behind her._

"_That's too bad," she said. "My brother wanted you to teach him some Juuken."_

"_I can teach Hayate later. Take your coat."_

"_I don't need it," she reminded curtly. "Thank you."_

_Then she flung herself out the window and plunged into the snow outside. Despite the pressing need to report in for his mission, Neji felt compelled to do something when his family reconciled themselves to do stupid things, so against his better judgment he tucked her coat under his arm and followed her out. Hyumi was forever doing things like this to irk him; her and her brother both because they grew up together in the south house. Now that she was fifteen she was forever trying to insist she was grown up because she'd gotten pretty and she knew it. Stupid girl. She still needed her coat._

_Once through the window, however, Neji found he was mistaken, there was no snow, only tall silk screens with winter watercolor painted onto them. Hyumi had, of course, worked her way through the maze of screens already and because he didn't have time to waste before his mission he pulled a kunai from his hip holster and began slicing through the screens with quick whispering swipes of razor edge through fabric. The screens went on and on forever, one faceless snowy scene after another. Damn. Why did head family forever insist on adorning their rooms with an excess of furniture and bamboo screens? As through the Byakugan didn't make them pointless._

"_Hyumi," he called, slapping the kunai against his thigh at last in exasperation. "I'm not playing."_

"_Neji-kun…" Her voice sounded strange. "You try so hard to keep us safe. You're always so nice to us."_

"_No, I'm not," he groused, frowning. "What's wrong with you?"_

_He pushed the last screen over at last and realized why Hyumi didn't really need her jacket. It would have certainly been in the way for the man crouched between her knees just then, one hand vanished in the dip of her thighs his other working a rough circle around the curve of her left breast. He gripped too eagerly so the soft flesh swelled between his elegant fingers. Beneath him, Hyumi glanced at Neji with a curious expression of mild sisterly irritation and affection, and lifted her hips to more readily provide herself to her partner. As she was pulled at last against the man above her, her lily-white knees jerking instinctively, her soap-scum eyes rolling briefly up around, she smiled very coldly at him. _

"_I told you, I don't need my jacket," she told him. "You're too late. Now go the fuck away."_

_Hiashi didn't even look up from Hyumi's throat. "You have a mission remember? Best run along."_

"_This isn't real," Neji said calmly. "I stopped this. It didn't happen. You're twisting it."_

_Like a ripple ruining a reflection Hiashi's face blurred, his image melting into another clean browed, pale-eyed, dark-haired man; then into another; then another. Interchangeable sneering faces. They were terrible faces because in them Neji could see the absolute certainty he'd actually seen the night of Hyumi's assault – all-consuming superiority and unashamed lust, the unchallenged certainty that this, **this** was and always had been his right as members of the head family Hyuuga. That this was something he'd been waiting for, been promised as his inheritance for having been born on the right branch of the family tree._

_Neji pressed a hand to his eyes. "Not everyone in the head family is like that."_

"_Not all of them, but enough of them."_

"_I won't follow your solution. Just because I'm free now, doesn't mean I'm like you. Murderer. I'm not a murderer." (Not anymore, someone whispered.)_

"_What about for me, nii-san?" _

_Neji turned around and found Hanabi standing the open door, the sunlight all around her like a nimbus clinging to her skin, burning off her hair. She was so beautiful he wanted to hold her and close her off from all the truths and all the things she and even he could never understand or want to understand about the horrors of the Hyuuga house around them. He wanted to be her big brother. He wanted to tell her so. _

"_Then why don't you?" she asked. "Can the Hyuuga stop you now? Now that their hold is broken, why not? What are their secrets now? You know everything."_

"_It's not enough," Neji murmured/Itachi murmured, "for me to be free."_

_The image flaked before him, the people peeling like shells of enamel and crumbling to leave Hinata, smiling down at him, her expression one of unfathomable satiation. Her hand was on his face, a thumb tracing the hooks and flourishes of his Cage Seal and she bent down to kiss the juin gently. _

"_I don't believe this. It's not real."_

"_Of course it's not. It's just a metaphor."_

"_What?"_

"_I'm not doing this. You are." Hinata leaned down, her little-girl's face, the one he'd tried to slaughter when he was fourteen, bending down near enough to speak the shape of her message against his forehead. "Wake up, nii-san"_

_- - -_

He woke up a month later

He woke up in battle.

He was standing a field of long grass. His hair was bound back. In his left hand he gripped a trio of fresh senbon, a kunai in his right. It was twilight and the shadows on the meadow shifted as the concussion of exploding tags beat the grass flat. Dark figures leapt in blurred zigzags, crazy spinning falls and secret flitting flashes through the prairie land, illuminated by the ignition of bombs and the brush fire. _Boom_! Tachi was throwing himself at an opponent. _Flash_! Nishi was in the air, wires trailing like fine silk strings. _Bang!_ Minami was putting her fist into a man's belly.

He felt that he shouldn't be there, that all this was wrong.

"Sensei!" Minami was screaming, her skinny arms gashed in rivets of blood. "Sensei! Get your lazy ass out here and _heeelp_!"

The girl bounded from the grass toward him, face a mask of panic framed in bubblegum curls. She darted for him and safety he represented, her little girl legs pumping wildly, wobbling and sending her tumbling head over heels, shrieking and swearing in a manner not exactly in line with her age and hair color. Seconds later, he saw why. From the tall grass burst a massive white beast of a nin-dog, growling and shaking the ground with the slam of his forepaws. Spotting its prey it yapped joyously, tail wagging as it pounced on her, jaws spreading open in a gaping red maw of fangs and tongue.

Neji darted between his charge and the dog, Byakugan blazing on, he hurled his senbon.

An exceptionally well-trained mutt, it recognized the danger and ducked the needles intended for its eyes and he caught the animal in it's the meaty muscle of it flank. Fire ignited the battle field. The giant dog spun around, black lips curling off glistening ivory fangs and charged him. Neji twisted and slammed a chakra poisoned hand into its flank, fire and heat diffusing into fur and flesh.

The animal howled and tumbled, but Neji was already on his feet again, moving toward the sound of Tachi's panicked yells, the detonation of Minami's exploding tags, the deafening silence that might have been Nishi alive or dead. He felt chakra – powerful, not unbeatable – burning at the edges of his awareness like incinerating comets shooting through the universe of his perception. They moved slowly because they hadn't seen him yet, thought they were fighting mere genin and in accordance to that, they were holding back. He could take them. It would be easier one-on-one, if his students could keep one occupied –

"_Akamaru_! Fuck, shit, goddamn it!"

And Inuzuka Kiba was suddenly kneeling in front of him.

For a split second he didn't see Neji, because his eyes were on his dog. Fear set the chuunin's face back a few years as he touched the hound's neck ruff in concern, his head bowed down to speak softly, comfortingly. (_'I could kill him right now. He'd never see it…'_) Then Kiba twisted toward him, nose flaring – he'd caught the scent of a fourth attacker. His face was a contortion of hatred and vengeance, all fangs and blood red tribal stripes, matted dark hair and hot adrenaline instinct… Then recognition struck him and the animal became human, wide-eyed and shocked.

"Neji?" the Inuzuka croaked. "What the...hell?"

"Sensei!" Nishi shouted, running out in front of him suddenly, grabbing his arm. "There's still two more! We need help!"

Kiba's eyes flickered, instantaneous connection, a snapshot of terrible understanding. "_Sensei_?"

Before Kiba could move, Neji was on him. There was an instant, just before the first of twenty-four strikes hit, that he was face to face with Hinata's teammate, dark eyes flown wide, mouth open, stuck on some protest, a profanity, (never a plea. Never Kiba.) Neji struck Kiba down; riddled his body with bullet-strike blows; knifing the last strike into his neck and slamming him out of awareness so hard he probably never felt the impact. The Inuzuka hit the ground unconscious. Immediately he was seen to by Akamaru, who leapt protectively over his master and snarled at the young Hyuuga.

"Good dog," Neji said thickly. He put a thumb and forefinger in his mouth and whistled for his team to break off contact. Instantly they Body Flickered to his side and assembled in a defensive position.

"The dog is still moving," Nishi pointed out. "Should I kill it?"

"No. Leave them." Neji felt as though something were lodged in his throat. "Focus on the Aburame."

Sure enough, the grasses began to bend and bow, shivering as the black writhing swarm of Kikai bugs roiled over the ground. In the half-light, their shells glistened green black, a mobile cloud of clicking oil dark specks from which a heavily hooded boy rose out, standing on the mass of insects like it were a platform. Neji couldn't see his eyes through the pair of sunglasses, but the long silence in which he regarded the other Leaf-nin spoke reams to Neji. He still hadn't shifted a muscle when the third member of their group leapt from the long grass, sending a burst of terror and nausea through the Hyuuga before he fully recognized…

Hinata did not have pink hair.

"Oh my God, Neji?" Haruno Sakura stared. "Hyuuga Neji? What are you doing here?"

Shino answered her quietly. "He's choosing sides."

Sakura's eyes found Kiba then.

In that instant Time again defied what he previously knew about it, that it was linear and ever moving. Instead, for that moment it seemed that time froze, locked and suspended all of them in a state of inertia and held them still while a cocktail of panic, urgency, adrenaline, and longing filled the crevasses and cracks of his mind to the brim. He didn't know what to do. There was never a plan for this or he'd thought…he'd been so sure he'd know what to do if he…He'd never realized he might not know what to say or how to explain himself to fellow Leaf-nin. He realized with horror – _he didn't want to see them._

Then Time shot forward.

"Minami! Nishi! Tachi! Focus on the bugs, fire and water!" he barked. "Do not engage! Contain!"

They scattered instantly, reverting all their focus on element based jutsu and defense. 'Contain' always meant the opponent was of superior caliber to their skill, it meant hold their own until Neji freed himself up to provide their back up. It also meant he needed to neutralize Sakura. _Now_. He threw himself at her – watched her green eyes go wide – and began the meticulous, lightening fast process of destroying himself and everything he'd been until this second when he chose. Sakura evaded his first attack, a straight out barrage of Juuken that put her inside his hakke, but too close for a Sixty-Four Strike. He pressed her, hands burning chakra.

"Neji! Stop! What are you doing!?"

He pumped in and out of her defensive counter attacks, darting up and through and inside her guard. She drove him out by slamming a fist into the ground, sending quakes and fissures splintering through the earth. He leapt to evade the concussion, Body Flickered and came at her from the side. She sensed him, spun and drove her skull-shattering fist at his neck, _connected_! – Only to have the Kage Bunshin explode in a cloud of smoke. She recovered, ducked, pulled her own kawarimi and just barely avoided the brush of death that burst through her clone's belly.

Her eyes were wide, disbelieving.

"Neji, what are you doing?" Sakura whispered.

Neji didn't take his eyes of her (that was physically impossible with his Byakugan active) but he spared some attention for his team. They were playing it safe, keeping far out and using Bunshin and genjutsu, never engaging physically with Shino's insects. Kabuto did his job teaching anyway – they knew the danger.

Sakura capitalized on his distraction by hurling a barrage of exploding tags. He snapped out of range with a chakra burst and Body Flickered at her back, slamming a glancing blow to her shoulder with his Juuken. He heard her spit a curse as she rolled away, coming up with kunai in hand. Her cheek was smudged in dust and ash, like a dirty thumbprint dragged over her face. Absurdly, a fragmented part of him took the opportunity to realize Haruno Sakura was a beautiful girl in battle; all speed and kinetic energy and bright feline green. Eyes that sparked and burned spinning galaxies of emotion. She'd always been easy to read. Sakura's teeth snapped white and angry as she shouted at him.

"Neji, stop this now!" She blocked his volley of shuriken. "You can _stop_! Neji, we've been looking for you!"

He gritted his teeth and pulled two handfuls of senbon from his thigh and hip holsters, charged them with chakra.

"Neji, please. Hinata is –"

His arms snapped forward, loosing the senbon in a glittering barrage of streaking lights. A kunai flashed from her hip into her hand and darted across her body, deflecting his projectiles with quick flashing swipes – only to scream out when Neji's palm plowed into her hip from her right. Her eyes demanded how the _fuck_ he'd gotta past her guard. Her scream was of as much rage as it was pain. Neji twisted away from her axe kick, somersaulted, sprang back to his feet and hit her with another rain of needles. She snarled at him, juked and spun through the attack and came at him with a sweeping hay maker that could and would take off his head if it connected.

He ducked, grabbed, swung her momentum and threw her and only an acrobat flip saved her landing and launched her at his midriff. The move caught him unguarded and she managed to catch his ribs in a sloppy backhand that hit him like a sledgehammer. Neji hit the ground, a falling rocket crashing through earth and foliage until after an eternity of smashing and shredding and skidding through razor-sharp debris he ground to a halt –

"Dammit, Neji! You idiot!"

Sakura caught him by the arm and wrenched him around, pinning him so hard he felt something crack in the upper region of his arm.

"What do you think you're doing?"

The world blackened, then brightened and she was holding a crushed tree branch in her fist. Neji reappeared at her left, flickered, was on her right, flickered again and again and again and he was everywhere, he was all over and all around. She was one and he was thousands and reality fragmented accordingly. Her eyes darted and flitted wildly. He was too fast for her and she knew it. He knew it. So she started swinging. She struck out as his illusionary image. Her fists like meteorites, devastating the world and sending concussions to the bedrock because one hit, just one blow from her war-goddess hands would end him…

Then Neji drove his hand into her spine.

He felt the breath go out of her, heard the infinitesimal hitch of surprise, of _hurt_ in her voice. Then she toppled forward like a puppet with its strings cut into Neji's arms, folding limply into him. He let her weight carry him to his knees, lowered his mouth to her ear as he laid her down. His lips kissed her hair – incident of proximity – as he whispered:

"Tell them I'm sorry. Tell them…" He didn't know. "Good-bye."

"_Neji_…no…"

But he'd already darted away to help his genin team with Shino.

"Neji-sensei!" Nishi cried gratefully at the appearance of the jounin. "We don't know how to fight him. He sucks all the chakra out of our regular attacks. And we aren't very good at fire jutsu. What do we do?"

"Bastard's bugs are _eating_ all my jutsu!" Minami howled.

Neji sheathed his kunai and waved them down with a click and a whistle. His students stared at him in disbelief, weapons wobbling uncertainly in their hands, then slowly dropping to their sides. The Hyuuga nodded and walked toward the mass of bugs, eyes glowing in the dusky light. After a moment Shino's insects began to recede, withdrawing to the strange safety of their host's body. Vanishing into the folds of the other teen's clothes, the small sea of black Kikai dwindled until only a perfunctory cloud of defensive bugs remained. Minami and Nishi were visibly disgusted. ("Oh my _God_! Where do they _go_?" Minami choked.) He continued to gaze wordlessly at Neji.

"Have they forced you into this?" Shino asked at last.

"No," Neji said. "Not exactly."

"I didn't think so."

I'm not Uchiha Sasuke. They need to know that."

"Aren't you?" Shino asked and for a split second he was a red-eyed clan-murderer, pale faced and dressed in black and red. Then it was Shino again. Neji closed his eyes.

"No." He glanced toward Sakura. "I'm not like him." He stood up. "Our mission is done. We're going. Follow and I'll have to stop you. We were never here to harm Konoha."

"You work for Orochimaru."

"No I don't."

Shino's brow furrowed. "Who then?

Neji felt his broken eyes spinning in his skull like tops surgically placed there by another. He opened his mouth to reply –

- - -

_Naruto was sitting on the wall of the Hyuuga compound. The east wall outside his window, just beside the tree outside his room. The branches were fill of fat little sparrows and Neji was looking out at the blonde boy in orange, still a genin of twelve and thirteen as Neji remembered him best, but watching him with a kind of thoughtful silence that was impossible for the real thing. _

"_So what now, Neji?"_

"_What do you mean?"_

_Naruto shrugged, tossing his shoulders up and grinning sideways. "Oh c'mon now. Your Cage Seal is gone, man. What are you gonna do now? Keep serving Orochimaru-bastard-sama until he goes just bonkers enough to gut you? Or steal your eyes maybe?"_

"_I can't go back now," Neji pointed out. "They'd have to kill me."_

_The blonde laughed, a childish guffaw flung up and over the empty head family houses. "Liar!" he shouted, like it were a game. "Bullshit, Neji! Buuuullshit!" He bit of the end of the word with sharp white teeth. "You're not scared what they'll do to you. How could anything, even death, be worse than what Itachi's done? What Orochimaru has done? What Takon has done? What Kabuto has done? No. What scared the fuck out of you, Hyuuga Neji, isn't the head family, man."_

_And then Naruto was right in front of him and Neji was fourteen again. The blonde trapped him against the wall of his bedroom, hands veined and rippling with boiling black and red chakra, blue eyes burned scarlet and slit up the centre like an animal's. The Beast inside that only Neji had seen that day during the Chuunin Exams, a monster superimposed on an obnoxious orange moron that made him invincible. _

"_What scares you most… is what you might do." _

_When Neji opened his eyes a pair of pale white eyes stared back, his own condescending smirk, hair loose, dressed in the white robes of the family that he didn't really belong to. His eyes were obliterated disks of old ivory, splintered in the iris where three ragged black tomoe had tried to develop and ripped up through the old color like oil drops in white water. They spun lazily around the still hidden pupil in the centre that, like the rest of his iris, was splintered and cracked under the clear membranes of the outer eye. _

_Neji shook his head. "I'm not afraid."_

"_You're not in control," Neji said. _

"_I'm in control. I wouldn't do anything like that," Neji hissed. _

"_You're not in control," Neji insisted. _

"_Shut up!" Neji shouted. _

"_Shut up!" the other Neji mimicked. "Like there hasn't been enough silence."_

"_I don't believe…"_

"_No one is going to change the Hyuuga."_

"_Why are you…?"_

"_Because the past repeats itself, but it doesn't have to mimic it completely. Last lesson, Hyuuga." He watched himself in fascination, lean forward and whisper against his own mouth, placing the word on his own tongue: "Don't make my mistake."_

"_Make my own," he finished. _

_**Author's Note:**_

_BAAH! Random update of doom! I noticed I had this sitting on my back-up drive half finished and felt inspired by the summer time. Finished it up and thought, hell, might as well post it. Unbetaed, sorry. I'm confident I've managed to shed all my readers, but for anyone out there still listening: Thanks so much for your Neji-love. Also, ignore the one-shot I have posted (Insecticide) it's kinda of an off-shoot of this story. Same tone, but they don't make sense together. Anyway. Lulz See you later. _


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